'Nother Solent

The Canadian flag is a trademark of the Canadian government

. If you visit FORCES Canada, the Canadian branch of a smoker's rights group, you will see the following astonishing message:

10 January 2002 - The Canadian flag has been removed from this website as use of it is a "trademark infringement". The flag is owned by the Canadian Government. Private citizens are not entitled to its use.

And what a corker of a post this is! That splendid chap Dr Frank

... I'm sorry I can't keep this up. That sadist has insulted the very ether by passing on this yeuch-inducing spume of the military-industrial complex about spiders impregnating cows or cows impregnating hamsters or something.

And here are wise words from that most excellent and admirable Jeff Jarvis

on Terrorist home videos.

(Note he's moved to www.buzzmachine.com)

My super, multi-talented and in every way loveable dear chum

Jay Zilber says, regarding the question of why we bloggers do the evildoer Tim Cavanaugh's work for him,

"My position ... is that when Mind Over What Matters fails to jump at the slightest provocation, we're letting the terrorists win."

An unexpected pluralism

. Instapundit mentioned this NY Times article 2 Jews Outlast Taliban. Maybe Not Each Other. in order to take a poke about the final ending of the Brutal Afghan Winter.

My eye was caught by this:

"While Mr. Levi spoke, two women came to the door to hear holy readings. Mr. Levi is regarded locally as a man of religious learning and these visits seem to be his sole source of income, perhaps explaining his deprived circumstances."

I knew that there were Hindus, and had been Jews, in Afghanistan. What I didn't know is that at least some presumably Muslim women would come to a Jew for holy readings, whatever they are.

Er.. hi. Come here often? Know anyone?

Oh, let me guess, you came along with that nice chap from "Suck." That's, um, awfully nice. I expect you want to know what "absolutely everybody linked to, and no wonder." This is it. No it's not. I can't believe this, my big day and the code won't go. Goodbye cruel world, I'm off to Tora Bora to die gloriously.

[Update. Didn't like Tora Bora. Can you believe it, some chap with a beard stole my clothes at gunpoint? I had to come back dressed in these grotty old robes, though I did manage to come away with the thief's rather nice watch which he dropped while putting my lipstick on. While I was away a lady called Myria fixed everything, and I decided to live after all, and devote myself to to the good work of capitalist self-promotion. This is the link to where Tim Blair electronically gatecrashed a talking heads show on Australian TV, and this was what I came back with.]

A glimpse into a different world...

I sent my brother the Insanity Test posted below. He said it had reached his office from another source an hour ago, and sent me a link to "Convicts Reunited" in return. He added that he had not yet signed up.

YET?

There is a suspicious jokiness about the Privacy Policy quoted. And surely no one would really be so crass as to advertise "The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers" on the banner... would they?

You MUST try this.

Go to Damianation and do the insanity test. Make sure the sound is on. Am I the only one who left it running to see how long it went on for?

Phonics is a Republican plot says a "profoundly stupid" article described thus by Joanne Jacobs.. It is, too. Stupid, I mean. The author, Stephen Metcalf, daringly reveals that the Bush family and some other family involved in selling tests had three generations born at about the same time. Well, there's a bit more substance than that, but it annoyed me the way he talked as if no one could ever dream that the Democrats and the teachers' unions might have a few interests in common.

For a UK angle see this Libertarian Alliance Pamphlet by Brian Micklethwait. No, you won't read it if I say "pamphlet", it sounds too respectable. Correct that to "angry rant from personal experience" by Brian Micklethwait.

Breen and Solent Mud Wrestling Shock

. Not really, but saying, "you made some really very good points, Moira, particularly about taking charge of your own life" does not get those hits coming. (Hey, that take-charge line is yet another argument in support of the idea of "America! Change yourself first!" Am I going to have to become Noam Chomsky? Aaargh! No! One day I might elucidate the differences.)

I tried to work up an analogy of why the demand that you water the houseplants you never asked for was like having to pay for welfare programs but it sort of died in the earth.

Pulling the subject back to female pioneers, Richard Aubrey made a good point: "Things that would generate a hostile response when done by and to a man befuddle a man when done by a woman. This change of tempo in the social dance usually works to the advantage of the one who starts it, which is to say the woman. So she has no reason not to keep it up."

Warblogger, thou art mortal

, says Jim Henley in qualified defence of Justin Raimondo. Also he directs me to Ginger Stampley's White Rose which discusses the housewife wars. Shiloh Bucher also weighs in with a duster. As well as the recent post, scroll down to where she commits herself to "better blogging through clean closets." I said I was going to look for "magic of self-transformation" posts, but that was not what I meant.

Well, it's new to me

even if the post does date from November 1st last year. From Michael's weblog, reached via Hawspipe, a deeply responsible line of argument to take with pacifists.

Dunno why I keep going on approvingly about people punching people. Some deep psychological compensation for my ineradicable temperamental wimpiness is at work.

Red Ken: same old stuff.

I have to say that I think Iain Murray is 170 degress wrong in his praise of Ken Livingstone for what he says in this Evening Standard article. Any "Massive investment" in communities will show as small a payoff, social or financial, as the last twenty trillion pounds did. Did I say "small"? Small would be lucky. It will probably be negative. As for making it harder to exclude black children who misbehave, think of the effect on black children who behave. Would you work well with a violent criminal sitting three feet from you every day?

I said 170 degrees rather than the full 180 to allow for the true words "How about some legal guns."

[Added later: if you joyfully boggled at the idea of Red Ken's conversion to victim re-armament, de-boggle down. Iain Murray said it, not Ken.]

There's a story going round

that conservative black activist Jesse Lee Peterson is going to sue Jesse Jackson for civil rights violations and assault and battery. Far be it for me to comment on what actually happened at the meeting where the fight broke out (although a happy coincidence of first names does allow me to safely say, hope you got at least one good punch in, Jesse!), but if the case makes the BBC acknowledge the existence of such astounding things as conservative black activists, I shall be happy.

While he does the cooking

, my husband likes to report back to me about snippets heard on the radio. Did you know that half of all the strike-days in Britain take place in some part of the Post Office? Or that Soho parking meters earn more than the minimum wage?

Husbandwork.

Both Random Jottings and Inappropriate Response are pursuing me with gunk-dipped Purdy brushes, starved houseplants and dingy ivory sofas.

Readers of a sensitive disposition may object to the following.

I torture paintbrushes. I dip them in incompatible types of paint. I lovingly mangle their "edge" or whatever you call it by winkling down into inaccessible corners. I let the paint dry on good and hard, preferably by leaving the brush uncleaned on a windowsill, but sometimes I balance it on an armchair for variety. Then I throw them into horrible dark corners of the garage for fifteen months. Then I use them for clearing out spiders. Then I say, "oh, did you mind very much, sweetie? Never mind. Buy a new one."

I'm only about two days behind

on the letters now. I briefly tried an insane system where I would save letters to a special "unanswered" file then pass them through to a "dealt with" file. Sorry.

Several letters deal with Justin Raimondo's stats: Robert Martin says, "...the breakdown doesn't support that total [of 11 million]. Whatever the total, consider this. When your site is titled "antiwar.com," haven't you pretty much cornered the market on everyone plugging in just about any kind of search that includes the word "antiwar" anywhere in its formulation?"

On similar lines, Daniel Hartung writes, "those numbers are generated by (my count) nine (9) columnists, several of whom have been well-known for years (e.g. Alexander Cockburn), supported by as many researchers and even an editorial staff. It's hardly fair to put the hit count of a pro-am site against any single warblogger. If he wants to start comparisons with Marshall or Kaus, (or probably most fairly, Tabloid.net) that's another thing."

Looking at the daily totals Instapundit, which I'm sure I recall mentioning a high of 23,000 seems to be at least comparable to Mr Raimondo's average of 11,000. Though, to be reasonable about this, what has that to do with whether either of them are in the right?

"Reasonable." A thousand curses on the word. You heard the man. Had I been a bit less reasonable I'd be in Pravda by now.

Mama Spank

. A reader called Dan writes regarding the trial of humanity in "Have Spacesuit Will Travel". Although he didn't directly say whether the galactic authorities had the right to try humanity, he does think that a possible defence of the galactic authorities' extermination of the horrible aliens "has to do with the difference between preventative law enforcement vs. correcting problems after they arise." In other words the humans were only potentially dangerous, whereas the Bugs had proved they were. As Dan wisely says, "instead of assuming that everyone is potential criminal, you let everyone do their own thing, then when it is obvious that the repeated admonition "Mama Spank" doesn't work, shoot them in the brain."

Female pioneers nice guys

, says reader Tom Roberts. His mother's godmother, Elizabeth Kirk Rose, presently aged 102 was one of the first women MDs and combined motherhood, keeping house, coping with the practical difficulties of her husband's blindness and maintaining a medical practice. With all that, says Mr Roberts, "actually, she had to be both smarter and nicer than her compatriots (all male of course) as her career was not at all guaranteed by merely passing through the curriculum. Specifically, she could have been prevented from specializing after the MD by the faculty never recommending an internship or residency position. As things went, she had her specialty chosen for her, Pediatrics, which was seen as being compatible with her gender." My apologies, Dr Rose.

But even this gentle rebuke doesn't keep me quiet for long. I now re-hypothesize that there are two success strategies for pioneers: you can either charm or push your way to the top. Interestingly, Dr Rose's male contemporaries were utterly charmed, while her female contemporaries thought her "pushy" - although I would imagine that the behaviour so described would be considered completely normal now.

Various people I know have met Margaret Thatcher. They all report that she is just like your best friend's mother.

Pellerito is back

- not in Libertyblog which is deep in slumber, but in Samizdata. He has a piece about bonds which makes the issue (haha!) as clear as it is ever likely to be to me. I think he may be cross with me for saying that he "gets his hands dirty" actually working with economics. I did not mean to be rude, indeed I have the greatest admiration for anyone who, for the good of all strives to understand these evil little beasts. An economic bit me in the leg in June 1978, so I know whereof I speak.

Don't read this article.

It's in the Times, it's about how they grade examinations and it is worthy in its aims. But it is completely incomprehensible, which is not the fault of the hard-working writer but that of the five or ten incompatible agendas different bits of the state have tried to fulfil in creating umpteen different forms of assessment. You can just look at it if you like. Now take a pill. Why do they bother?

The Guardian praises Fascists

, fascist railway systems, rail privatisation, splitting the Italian railway system into separate operating companies for track and trains.. .I always knew this would happen. I've slipped into an alternative world. All hail President Hague and The Sublime Porte, His Majesty King Al of the House of Gore. Seriously, this is not a bad article, in fact it has at least one quotable quip, namely that it was not true that under the fascists the trains ran on time - just nobody dared say when they were late. But how very odd to see it in the Guardian. What will their letters page say tomorrow?

Justin Raimondo Wrote Me a Fan Letter (Sort of).

Hey, good thing I snuck up to check my e-mail during a brief interval while rest of family have gone off to all-night Tesco's in order to buy a ghastly product called "Spiro 2" with which to further bring home to me my inferiority at all forms of computer games. The wicked Justin Raimondo has e-mailed me. (His heading was "PLEASE don't sulk.") No time tonight for analysis, here's the letter:

Dear Natalie:

I was GOING to deal with your remarks on my "OTT" swipe at Andrew Sullivan, really I was: but by the time I got near the end of my 3500-word screed, I was so exhausted that I just didn't have the energy. That's one reason: the other is that you, apparently, are the Reasonable Faction of the Warblogger Conspiracy. Your nuanced remarks about how you aren't against putting 9/11 in the more general context of US foreign policy, contrasted with, say, Joanne Jacobs' militant "luv it or leave it"-ism, put you in a different category altogether. But I WAS going to put you in at the end, as a contrast to Sullivan's "India (and Israel) must be unequivocally supported" stance.

Okay, as to your question about the "hits/visits/unique visitors" etc. that Antiwar.com gets: I've actually done a little research. Over the last 30 days, we've gotten a grand total of 11,147,014 "hits". This breaks down as follows:

Visits 524,516
[Average Per Day 17,483]
Unique Visitors 181,041
Visitors Who Visited Once 134,833
Visitors Who Visited More Than Once 46,208

What's interesting is the amount of time they spend on the site:

Average Visit Length 00:10:50
Median Visit Length 00:05:13

Of course, that's for the whole site. My column, last month, had 104,476 visits (we don't have a breakdown
on 'unique visitors' for individual items, but I would say it's roughly 100,000.)

On weekdays, we average 15,000 unique visitors per day: 10,000 on the weekdays. There's usually some major link somewhere feeding traffic, either from Yahoo, WorldNetDaily, or some other source. It'll be interesting to see how the mention in Instapundit turns into hits.

Antiwar.com started out just as many of the "warblogs" did: one guy ranting. Of course, it's ended up that way, too -- but with 100,000-plus readers per month.

So, as you can see, Instapundit's somewhat sniffish remark that we're just "trolling for hits" is a bit pretentious. If anyone benefits, traffic-wise, it's going to be Reynolds, not us.

I see you are a science fiction fan. Of course, you are aware of sf fandom: it's interesting how much the "blog" phenomenon parallels the "fanzines" of the sf world. When I was a teenager, fanzines were my primary literary outlet -- and, boy, did I have fun!

It was funny, really, how Reynolds simply assumed that Antiwar.com is a typical, leftist anti-capitalist band of Birkenstock-wearing Chomskyites. It apparently never occurred to him that anyone to the right of Jonah Goldberg might be opposed to turning the American republic into a souped-up version of the Roman Empire."

Announcement.

I would just like to say that I personally love Matt Welch's hat.

I wasn't mentioned

in Justin Raimondo's denunciation of warbloggers, kindly e-mailed to me by antiwar.com. Sulk. The ingratitude of the man. I tried to get him some hits the other day for going OTT in an anti-Sulli article. Couldn't that have been good for at least a dishonourable mention as a minor lackey of the forces of evil? Instapundit, Ken Layne, Bjorn Staerk and Sullivan (of course) do get the treatment, and Joanne Jacobs comes in for particular ire. Raimondo defiantly tells her he will not be silenced,("To that, I – and millions of others – will never consent, and if you don't like it… well, you can try to shut us up, but I wouldn't advise it."), as if she in particular were likely to pop over to his house with a bunch of ex-Pinochet secret police.

Last point: Mr Raimondo says that he personally gets a lot more hits than all the warbloggers put together, but does not cite any numbers. His qualification "(visits, visitors, readers, whatever)" suggests that he has done a calculation that gives one answer by one method of counting "one hit", and another by another. If you're reading, Mr Raimondo, tell us more.

Shock news update: world is round!

Like ripples after the tidal wave, September the 11th has had several second-order small effects that have only become apparent now that months have gone by and people, except for the bereaved, can find it in themselves to look around. One of them is that the illogical American habit of putting the month first when writing dates as numbers may come to dominate. This, of course, stems from the striking coincidence that 9-11 is the US emergency number. Another is that we now all know the US emergency number. (Possibly soon to be ours as well; the authorities are weighing the greater ease of remembering 999 against the greater probability of it being rung in error by small children or even by a mobile phone hitting the side of your bag as you walk.) Yet another effect is that I finally started to believe all this stuff about time zones. 9am in New York is 2pm here. I'll never forget it. Previously if I had to call the US I had to do things like hold a satsuma up to a lamp and rotate it, uttering incantations like "the sun rises in the East, so we get it first," or remember a completely obscure snatch of dialogue from Chico and the Man.

I said I'd never forget it, but for the first time in months, I did forget today. There's a person in America still sleeping the sleep of the just to whom I bunged an e-mail hours ago in the confident but foolish expectation of a quick reply. However, in general, all this blogging really has taught me that the world really is round and in Australia it really is already tomorrow.

One from the obits.

I confess I had not heard of this Lord Young of Dartington (born Michael Young) until reading his obituary, but he certainly seems to have been interesting and original. His last daughter was born when he was eighty years old, for one thing. Something of a mixed legacy on the political front: I do not look on the ground-breaking Labour manifesto of 1945 as a great boon to mankind, and I can get heartily sick of the Consumers' Association and its mag Which? sometimes. (Message to the ever-vigilant Which? scanner bots descending from all directions: No, I do not want to take part in a free prize draw.) But if he was one of the first to look at "the way slum clearance schemes disrupted inner city communities" then he deserves a kind word. And one can scarcely object to a college for funeral directors.

The Open University, which he helped pioneer, is another curate's egg. It is an admirable way to finally get the degree in Mathematics or Romance Languages you always wanted, had life not got in the way first time round. But the OU Marxist strangehold on sociology helped get "Sociology Degree: Please Help Yourself" written over toilet paper dispensers all over Britain.

Money will corrupt blogging

, says Anita Jensen.

I don't buy it. If you end up with an audience of 150 persons daily (average) at a cent-per-view basis, you're making $1.5 . I can't imagine who would do this for the money. If you're attracting 1500 people, you're still making a whole lot less than the minimum wage.

I think the model for payment ought to be some kind of deposit-in-account system where I (the reader) put $50 or $100 into the box and then each view is automatically subtracted. When the money's gone, the outfit that deals with the money advises me and I can post more or not, as life dictates.

The whole point of this is that it takes one decision every several months to ask yourself if what you're getting is worth to you what you're paying. Anyone who didn't think it was could easily reverse course and redo his budget. This is not rocket science and I am also assuming most of the folks who read blogsites are not idiots.

Efforts to bring such a system down to 5-year-old levels are just silly. People are pefectly capable of figuring out if they want to see a site daily and thus run the horrendous risk (!) of paying 1 cent for the privilege or if they want to save it all up and read once a week. I am not, myself, quite so anal, but I suppose there are folks out there who are not me.

As it stands, I have in the past three months spent money on blogs of assorted kinds that I liked but my main problem with doing it this ad hoc way is that I have no way of recalling (on an instant basis) who I paid for what and how much. I absolutely do not have the time or energy to delve back into ancient credit card receipts to try to decipher this information and I can't actually emphathise with the person who would try. Although, of course, all power to them.

I keep touting this because I don't think I'm unusual. I expect there are many others who have dropped dollars on their favorite sites and would like to do on a sustainable basis but can't stand the boredom of keeping notes. One of my understandings about the entire Internet hoo-hah was that it would help me out from keeping notes, fr example. I have an account with Amazon that appears to be bottomless and (so long as I keep paying my bills) that's exactly what I like about the Internet. I can go to Amazon any time, buy what I want and know I won't face a hassle about doing so.

That's what I think bloggers ought to aim for: a painfree auto-deduct system that works without customer input.

Anyway, I appreciate your taking note of my viewpoint, even if I am not gathering universal agreement.

Effect of nicotine varies according to race.

The equivalent story about alcohol would be more of a hot potato, but the BBC seems to regard this story about a study comparing likelihood of lung cancer across the races as uncontroversial. Good that they do. Race is actually an intrinsically interesting subject if you can keep the lid on your emotions; recent insights into British history gained from genetic studies are fascinating.

Variety packs:

Before all this feminism causes me to totally lose my Paglia-style credibility, can I direct you to Random Jottings where there is some very funny stuff about how these days even the Nazis will have racially mixed propaganda posters.

The objection to the tampering with the NY firemen statue is that it was meant to show a true moment of history. You want a statue with a lot of idealized females personifying diverse geographical backgrounds and ways of life? Come over to London and airlift out the Albert Memorial. You can have a big stone cow representing "agriculture" thrown in for good measure.

Drat.

I just missed hit no.16,000.

Does your wife work? No, she's old and knackered and I'm trading her in.

Dare I break a lance for the feminist cause in the face of Moira Breen's stormy riposte, backed up by the big guns of Instapundit.

Yeah. The running dogs of the masculinist oppressors will never intimidate me! My dear spouse and helpmeet, despite the time when he set up a time-delay camera to catch a kelpie in the act of changing the sheets, would be the first to defend me against any charge that I am the sort of woman "who would never ever personally confront an actual individual male over loutish behavior." Our relationship is more the sort where he starts citing the statute of limitations. (Crimes such as "Not Knowing Where the Bin-liners Were Kept After Two Years of Marriage" are considered "spent" after five years. Criticising My Driving In Front of Witnesses, like murder, has no statute of limitations at all.)

But it would be unladylike to dwell on my own particular case, particularly as I have no intention of letting my hus. tell his side of the story on my flippin' blog. Nor will I waste too much time specifically defending Ms Maushart, whose book I may never have the pleasure of reading, but I say again, she has a point. I won't jaw about the exact percentages but I thought she was spot-on with the general message of this:

"The moment a man gets married," Maushart says, "his domestic workload almost disappears. He immediately gets about 70 per cent less cleaning, 50 per cent less cooking and 90 per cent less laundry. There are nowhere near these benefits for a woman when she gets married. And these days you're at pains to deny that you're doing it, because apart from being exhausted by it, you're ashamed of yourself."

Then Moira comes back with, "Not a very nice thing to do someone you allegedly care for, is it?" And that is also spot on. But the two statements are not incompatible, either as to intrinsic truth or likelihood of together accurately describing a married couple. The mark of a system, or climate of opinion, that needs reform is that it makes people who may well be nice - at least as nice as most people - do un-nice things.

Let's take the approximate truth of those statistics first. If you get a bunch of women together they moan about these same things. They have the status of proverbs, so common are they. Study after study says that in households where both have jobs, the woman does, in fact, do more than her share. She can't bear to have dirty socks on the floor; he can. Moira herself good-humouredly admits that tidiness "is a chick thing."

Among modern liberated folk it is unlikely to be the case that the man refuses or shirks any specific job. He'll do anything he's asked to. But he won't initiate, he won't remember unprompted, and he won't notice what needs doing. He'll put on a wash, if asked. But come eleven o'clock at night, it will still be in the machine. She will ask him to take it out and hang it up. He will. Then, says he, "is there anything else you want me to do?" She can't think right now. They are both tired. "Right then," he says, "I'm off to bed. Goodnight darling." And she won't follow him just yet, because first she has to feed the cat. And put away the milk that was left out after the last cup of coffee. And check the doors are locked (she gets worried about that; he doesn't.) And set the heating to "economy". And put out the letter that must be posted where it'll be seen. And put the grill to soak. And get out tomorrow's meat to be defrosted. Then she goes upstairs to the loo and sees that somebody - no, I'm not saying it's necessarily the husband - has, shall we say, had a sprinkle when they tinkle. So she cleans it up. And she notices that the shirt he so complaisantly hung from the shower rail is all wonky so that, if left, it would end up looking like one of Quasimodo's. So she straightens it. And then she goes to bed, and he says, "what kept you?"

I don't sound very gracious, going on like this. But that itself is another relevant point. One of the numerous intellectual debts I owe to my former political incarnation as a left-winger is this observation: it is always easier for the winners to act nice. My lord can dispense mercy to the peasants with a merry smile; I bet the peasants were a surly, resentful bunch. When women first broke into such professions as medicine and law, can you imagine what a bunch of obsessive harpies those first pioneers had to be? Feminism is, by hypothesis, a matter of looking at institutions and customs that have proceeded without opposition for centuries and pronouncing them wrong. It is seeing and denouncing a problem where no-one, even the victims, saw it before. It is hard to do this and stay welcome at parties.

I grant you, many modern feminists (and anti-racists) are parasites riding like fleas on the reputation established by their grandmothers. They have long since won the battles of simple justice that the earlier generation fought, and now coast along regurgitating their once-righteous anger and turning the hose onto the most absurd and innocent targets. But legitimate targets do still exist, even if, at least in the West, the abuses to be denounced are minor in comparison to those in other places and other times.

For example Maushart is also right to say this, "There is the more subtle, emotional care-taking work. Things like organising and masterminding the whole family enterprise..." I don't much relate to Maushart's particular example of the woman being expected to worry about how family relationships pan out. But "organising the whole family enterprise," yeah, been there. I challenge you, Moira, or any married woman to put your hand on your heart and swear to me that your husband has never said, "have we got my sister's birthday present yet?" or words to that pattern.

A last and less contentious thought. I too aspire to "the golden order and serenity of a household out of a de Hooch painting." Beautifully put. When disorder does enroach, I am particularly likely to retreat to the computer. Is that because it is a highly ordered micro-environment, I wonder?

Have Computer, Will Blog.

Andrew Millard kindly says, "I love your site, and appreciate anyone who mentions Heinlein stories in context of current events (even if she can't recall titles like "Have Spacesuit, Will Travel.)" He reminds me that "the main character (along with the representative specimen from an earlier era of Earth history - a Roman Centurion in this case) does take exception to being judged by these obnoxious aliens, and rather vociferously denounces their right to judge us. Indeed, the Centurion chucks his spear at them and dares them to fight fair. A great story and fully in keeping with Heinlein's typically positive view of humanity, warts and all."

Please settle at your soonest convenience.

Alan M. Caroll suggests a shift to e-bills on the micropayments page. Incidentally, you have no idea what agonies went into that bit of code "http://nataliesolent.tripod.com/micropayments.html#Caroll". In about 1980 a computer club was started at my secondary school. Anyone would've thought I was a prime candidate: SF fan, wanted to be astronaut, good at maths. Nah, I thought, nothing for me in that.

Go figure, Byers.

Would-be investors in the railways say, "Bite me once, shame on you. Bite me twice, shame on me." A proverb I first heard articulated by Pavel Chekov on Star Trek.

Talking of education by early evening TV, Moira Breen, quoting Jonathan Gewirtz (who writes good stuff to me too) with approval, denounces "The Day The Earth Stood Still" as "noxious totalitarian propaganda."

It's interesting that what I shall call the "Tidy Up Your Room Or Else" or "Virtuous Einsatzgruppen" model turns up so often in juvenile fiction. For instance there is a whole series of popular kids' books by Bruce Colville following on from "My Teacher Is An Alien", all of which use the common SF trope of a Trial of Humanity with blowing up Earth as one possible verdict. I eventually gave up on the series because, despite being engagingly portrayed as sassy and independent-minded, none of the human kids ever seemed to work up the nerve to stop trying to placate the galactic authorities and instead say, "at least on our world the Nazis lost!"

There's also that Heinlein juvenile which uses the same trial idea...

[Hi. This is the Demon of Almost Completely Irrelevant Asides here. My job is to lurk in Natalie's synapses ready to jump out when the opportunity arises and tempt her to waste even more time on the internet. Just gotta tell you about a really great temptation I put over her just now. She was a bit embarrassed at admitting that, once again, she didn't know which Heinlein story she meant. So she went off to search (Heinlein+"roman soldier"+SS) instead of asking the readers like my good buddy Angel Sticktothepoint wanted her to. Ho ho, I had her in my coils then. Sure as hell (geddit?) she found this great list of SF stories to do with mathematics, so she can kiss goodbye to any hope of achieving anything today. And now I can infect all you guys too. I love my job. Bye now.]

...although, with typical Heinlein complexity he one minute hints that he thinks the political setup that allows this is not all it should be, and next minute gets us cheering when he exterminates a whole race of unredeemable baddies.

Boy. Is that the time? Having just about managed to fight off the demon, I've got to log off now. Even arguing with Mol-ra about feminism and the Virtuous Dude about capitalism must wait for another day.

Such is the psychic grip

that this blogging stuff has on me that I actually woke up this morning thinking, I said "moot" when I meant "meet" in the previous post. Or perhaps I meant "muut" a Turko-uguric word meaning "that'll impress 'em", or even "maat", which as you know is Hausa for "Long time no see, Mr Welch!"

Propped up in the saddle

like El Cid, the recovering Iain Murray rides into battle, with a link to his own article in American Enterprise Magazine on the gap between European elites and their people regarding the death penalty. I found it interesting to see that the AEM thought it moot to put in a little note at the bottom saying that Mr Murray is an opponent of the Big Chop. His article sticks firmly to the question of the democratic deficit.

Ego-deflator

Virginia Postrel says that blogs aren't such a big deal and micro-payments won't happen. Now, now, dry your eyes. V.P. links to an article by Arnold Kling suggesting that we are using an outdated paper-era magazine model. Payment for content? Pooh, old hat, like paying for air. You pay for the thing or person that screens the air for anthrax. Except I mean, like, it's good anthrax. Um, that wasn't one of my more premium-level metaphors, was it? (Found for me by Joanne Jacobs)

How many people will this kill, I wonder?

Sometimes it's the little stories, the unsensational ones tucked away in the business section, that are the most ominous. An EU directive imposes insanely strict product liability. It is used to sue the providers of the free (FREE for heaven's sake) blood transfusion service. So maybe, think would-be investors, researchers, entrepreneurs, jobseekers, just maybe we won't go into the lifesaving business after all.

Like It Or Lump It.

I always used to despise the way newspapers headed their stories with idiotic puns. Now look at me. Yeah, blogging showed me it isn't that hard to write op-eds, but sometimes it also gives me a dawning sympathy with the awful things sub-editors do when hard pressed for a headline. To the saucy story in the Guardian. Yeah, it's that one about the EU reclassifying lumpy sauces as vegetables. Andrew Osborn, wishing to defend the EU, seems to think that it is some kind of a scoop to reveal that those wicked sauce-manufacturers (a) are multi-nationals, (b) used a lobbying firm to make their case and (c) blamed Europe.

To support (a) and (b) I will cite this:

"But the perfectly legal yet stealthy way in which multinationals fight their lobbying battles through the press leaves a rather sour taste, even if corporate interests do happen to coincide with media ones."

(a) "Multinationals" first. I thought the wonderful, liberating thing about European Union was that we would all be free to trade across borders. Gone would be the days of Little Englanders and Petits Francais; now companies would recruit and trade across this exciting jumbo-size pool of however-many customers. A company so constituted is called a multinational. In fact he has no evidence that the single-country sauce makers love and yearn for the sieve of the bureaucrat, so the entire multinational angle is just neurone-twitching for Guardian readers.

(b) They used a lobbying firm. So Herr Lumpen-Saucenmeister, who knows all there is to know about the secret recipe for 'Nice 'n' Chunky Five Spice Surprise' but nothing at all about whom to contact in the press hired someone who did. How awful, nein. And if Herr S. did feel the need to keep his name secret from the EU, could that be because the EU makes life nasty for people who criticise them - a government of men and not of laws, in other words?

(c) They sneakily complained to Europe, as opposed to, say, Ardnamuirchan Parish Council or the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board. Osborn writes:

"The Eurosceptic angle - the ludicrous eurocrat take - was an obvious winner and the story was cleverly sold to journalists on that basis."

That's because Europe was the problem. As ever.

Finally EU officials think it very hard that they are singled out. "Every country in the world has to make these kind of decisions," they say. Why? Who makes you? Is there a worldwide Jacquerie of fanatical supporters of bureaucratic import duties prone to placing the decapitated heads of Dolmio executives onto pikes and waving them outside Brussels windows?

Schools spite

. Read Joanne Jacobs on how the schools bureacracy are trying to strangle charter schools at birth in Hawaii. (With typical pettiness they won't let charter schools met ordinary state schools in sporting competitions.) The Cliff Slater column she links to starts off soooo calm and measured, but just stick with it to the end.

We had a whole dollop of this sauce in Britain when Grant Maintained schools were first started, but I'm happy to say that it was splatted firmly back up the collective noses of the Local Education Authorites. It did the LEAs no end of good to find out that quite a lot of their clients were happy to do without them. Now the situation has moved on (translation: I've lost track of it), and the fact that some of my kids' school tops still bear the old logo referring to the school as "G.M." marks them out as the deprived children of...

...the middle classes, actually. Midnight has struck, so I'm allowed to change the subject mid post. Isn't it strange how thrift has moved upmarket? You look at the pushchairs outside the school gates, and if it's a turbo-charged, titanium-coated, atomically-stabilized Maclaren costing fifty per cent more than one of the racing cars that the company sells as a consolation to wretched peons who can't afford their pushchairs, then you can be sure the owner is on income support. Our family pushchair has now moved on to an exciting new career as a load-bearing joist, but it came to us from an obscure charity shop representing local depressed people. Be that as it may, they seemed deliriously (if I may use the word) happy to get rid of it. Oxfam would never have allowed it through the front door.

Al-Quaeda. Anthrax. Alimony.

Which is the one that really terrifies you guys? I've never read the book reviewed in this Independent article, Susan Maushart's "Wifework", but I have no difficulty believing her when she says that more women than men seek divorce, that divorced women are less likely than men to wish to remarry, and that the reason for this is the division of housework.

My husband's skill at cooking is nearly enough to have me forgive him for years of thinking that pixies washed his socks and elves cleaned the toilet. Nearly.

Love's Young* Dream.

Dawson.com is back. And he speaks of a higher love even than that of Ann Coulter, or me. He snuck back on the 11th despite telling us all to wait until the 13th.

And other dreamers dream on... Libertyblog is still sleeping though, as are England's Sword and Mind Over. Samizdata has a takedown (with a micro-quote from me) of a horrid Dea Birkett article about education in the Guardian, plus some serious philosophy for your Sabbath reading. AintNoBadDude has a link to a stern warning from a great-looking site called Photodude which is wham-bam relevant to my stuff on pay-per-view. Jottings is a gentil parfit knight when it comes to female fireys and Damian Penny is going to be King of Canada. 'Scool. Blogs of War omits the proverbial best thing about McDonalds: there are always some brats there worse behaved than your own.

There is no room for Spanish Euros in the colourful universe of Inappropriate Response. Tim Blair can keep this job; it's flipping exhausting. And Instapundit? He's on a golfing holiday with Jimmy Hoffa. Would I lie to you?

*Actually I think I read somewhere that he's a year older than me. Love's Young Dream. I stand by it.

Magic in College (and I don't mean Hogwarts).

This trenchantly expressed e-mail came from Andrea Harris:

"As concerns the observation on the "magic" elements in the urgings to buy safety with self-transformation, I think I can help you out somewhat with a personal observation.

"I'm currently working on a Humanities major. Yes I know, I must be a masochist. Anyway, last semester I took a course with the glorious name of "Contemporary Multicultural Studies." Mostly we looked at slides of
folk art and engaged in discussions of how our society's racism and sexism and everything-ism sucks.
(My classmates came from every corner of the globe and all lifestyles were represented among us; the Orlando, Florida area has an extensively multicultural community, including servant-beating Saudi Princesses.)

"One day the professor was talking about her experiences living in government housing and how difficult it was to wend the bureaucratic maze to get anything done. I spoke up and said something about how this is an example of why government-run housing is so crappy, as well as are many other things taken care of by a bunch of federal initials; most people don't have the time to waste filling out ten thousand forms in triplicate and so forth to fix any problem. She replied that the solution is to make the government institutions "more caring."

"By what magic are we to accomplish this?

"Why, by the magic of "changing people and making them better." Then everything else will fall into place.

"That is why all these peace creeps and leftists and West/capitalism/etc. haters haven't come up with any solutions to balance out their diatribes. To their point of view, no action can be taken until humanity itself changes. For instance, we can't solve the problem of poverty until we change the way people think of personal property: as long as people think that they can "own" things, there will always be rich people. Notice I said "rich people" -- "activists" don't really mind there being poor people. It's the existence of the rich that cheeses them off. Poor people are always grateful; but just try to feed a rich person from the back of an Oxfam truck and see what thanks you get."

Many thoughts on micropayments.

Click here for a selection of letters on the subject of micropayments and pay-per-view.

There are wise - if frequently contradictory - words from Joanne Jacobs, Anita Jensen, Alan Caroll, Jonathan Gerwitz, Clay Shirkey, Myria, Geoffrey Barto, Jeff Jarvis and Eve Kayden.