Will this be the first election to see a “shy Labour” factor? How many voters are embarrassed to admit that their hostility to Brexit, or their tribal anti-Toryism, trumps their concern for their Jewish fellow citizens?
Scary times, for every political obsessive in Britain. Because every political obsessive, me included, is terrified that their preferred tribe will lose.
Here.
It’s Bryan Caplan (the guy who gave this lecture that I recently attended), talking to Darren Grimes of the IEA. Caplan disagrees with most voters, but in an ingratiating way. As he himself says towards the end of the conversation, if you have disagreeable things to say, say them agreeably and people will be more likely to listen.
LATER: Now, I’m listening to another interview. Scott Adams autobiographising. Terrific.
I spent my blogging time today concocting a posting about the opinions and discoveries of Anton Howes, and in particular this piece. My posting will be ready and up at Samizdata Real Soon Now. In the course of doing this I encountered this podcast which an American guy did with Howes. I’m now half way through this. So far: recommended.
That’s it for today.
I love the City of London Boundary Dragons, and I am pretty sure that the photo below is my favourite City of London Boundary Dragon photo that I have ever photoed:
That is one of the two Dragons on the south end of London Bridge. I photoed this photo on August 12th 2008.
When a strong shadow and weirdness are involved, the Thing itself is usually clear, but the shadow is weird. But in the above photo, the Thing is weird. And the shadow makes everything clear again. Which is an effect that I especially like. And I think we can tell from the framing that I noticed this at the time. This was not a fluke, except in the sense that this effect was there to be noticed and I had the luck to notice it. What I mean is: I did notice it at the time. It didn’t just happen to show up in a photo that I photoed for other reasons, or for no reason.
And what of that building reflected in the window? I rather think that may now have been obliterated, to make way for The Boomerang. Memo to self: go back and do the same photo again, preferably at the same time of day. On August 12th 2020 perhaps? But even without the shadow, a different (or maybe the same) reflection would be worth a go.
Earlier this evening, I (and a great many other people) attended the 19th Hayek Memorial Lecture:
Photo 1: I got there very early, hence all the empty seats.
The Official Photographer was Jean-Luc Picard. Not really, but photo 3 makes him look a bit like the noted space voyager.
Photo 4: The (large) room fills up.
Photo 5: Celeb sighting. Dominic Frisby. And is that his dad Terence he’s talking with? I think it just might be.
Photo 6: Syed Kamall, a recent IEA appointment. He gave someone a prize.
Photo 7: IEA boss Mark Littlewood does the intro.
Photos 8 and 9: Professor Bryan Caplan gives the lecture.
Photo 10: The first questioner was Vera Kichanova, one of the very few people in the audience whom I recognised.
Photo 11: Someone else photoing from the audience.
So, what did Caplan say? Briefly: poor country governments are often to blame for their bad economic policies, rich countries are often to blame for their bad immigration policies, and poor people, especially poor people in rich countries, are often to blame because they make bad decisions, especially bad decisions which hurt their children. That last one is the one you aren’t allowed to say, but most people still think this. When questioned about this, Caplan pointed out that refusing ever to blame poor people for their poverty is often a cause of bad policies. Instead of doing nothing (because it should be up to many poor people to help themselves), governments often do bad things. To “help”.
Another interesting thing about this lecture was that big multi-national enterprises came out of the story very well, basically for doing very well in poor countries, thereby proving that lots of people in poor and otherwise badly governed and badly managed countries could be doing far better, if they got the chance. That being why restrictive immigration policies do so much harm. They are keeping people who could do far better out of well governed countries.
There was also a guy videoing everything, so you won’t have to rely for ever on me to learn what Caplan said.
For quite a few months now I have been pacing about in my little flat in London SW1 (one of the many unfashionable bits of that postcode) looking for more space to put shelves for books and magazines and CDs. Will I have to move? The Horror. Will I have to chuck out some of my books and CDs? Double The Horror.
No. The great truth about shelving is that there is always, always room for more, if you just keep looking.
Example, look at this huge empty lump of absolutely nothing, in my bathroom, above the door-shaped gap that leads to the toilet, into which I now plan to put another shelf, upon which I will pile ancient copies of the BBC Music Magazine and Gramophone:
That giant gap of empty air with a wall behind it has been there for thirty years. I just never saw it for what it was, a big mouth shouting at me, saying: Give me a shelf! Give me a shelf! I can help! Just let me do it!
That will make a huge dent in the problem.
I put up these photos to basically get me to do this job. I have completed the design. I have the necessary brackets and screws, and one of the many planks I have collected over the years is the perfect size and ideal for the task. I just need to do it. So these photos are – indeed this entire blog posting is – a memo to self. Do this.
But before I do, I note that there is and has for several decades now been paint falling off the ceiling. So, before I embark on this construction project, I need to vacuum clean the ceiling, which I cannot do at night because it might disturb my neighbours, above and below. After that, it’s all go.
And no I don’t know what all those pipes are on the right, as we look. Strange, very strange.
I think this must be the first The Wires!!! posting at BMNB, but there were several at BMOB. What these postings celebrate is photography that itself celebrates new architecture, typically Japanese, which is full of The Wires!!!, but which never mentions The Wires!!!
Here are some classic photos in this genre, which I first encountered in this report, celebrating a modernistical new house in Kyoto:
I tried copying the top one of these three photos from where I had first seen it, but that didn’t work. Instead I tried copying it from here. That worked, sort of, because I found I’d copied all three of the above photos, in one big old .jpg file.
But since these all three photos feature The Wires!!!, and since, once again, these The Wires!!! were never discussed in the text, I am content to just shove up all three, in one big old .jpg file.
One day, some Japanese architect is going to design a building which includes The Wires!!! itself, as a decorative feature.
I predict that as soon as The Wires!!! start getting buried, The Wires!!! will start to be missed, and will become a relentless topic of architectural analysis. In other words the opposite of what they are now.
All of us who know anything of the broader picture of art and its history have what we know to be blind spots, in the form of things we know to have merit, to be significant, to have an intelligent audience, but which we personally can’t stand. Great, great, glad you love it, just don’t make me look at it, listen to it, etc.
My big artistic blind spot is jazz. Especially recent jazz, jazz perpetrated in my own life time, by drugged up artists more concerned with hiding from the shambles of their ruined and soon-to-end lives than with making proper tunes for a potentially wider audience. There you go. I can’t even write about jazz – can’t even think about it – without hurling abuse at it. (Early and badly recorded jazz with proper tunes, that I quite like. But, like many who hate a lot of classical music but might also strongly like some of it, I know too little about it all and don’t know where to start.)
Today, however, it occurred to me that there are plenty of things which I can’t stand actually experiencing, but which I love to read about. Most of history is ghastly, but I like reading history. And consider, in particular: war. I’d hate to actually be in a war, but I love to read about war, all the more so because war is so bloody horrible and I can congratulate myself on having throughout my life totally avoided all direct involvement in it.
Prompted by an amazon.co.uk email (amazon already knowing of my interest in a particular musical author (see below later in this sentence)), I have just ordered a couple of books by Ted Gioia, about jazz. (I quoted Gioia on the subject of JS Bach in this earlier posting here.) That way, I can learn lots about jazz, without having to listen to the bloody stuff.
If even slightly true, this, by David Archibald, is remarkable:
Lawyer Dan Harris writes that Chinese companies are now acting very short-term in their dealings with foreign companies. The situation reminds him of Russia in the 1990s. The Russians then, straight out of communism, would sign a deal but then immediately renege and run off with the cash, foregoing a large future benefit for a much smaller immediate gain. They did so because they did not expect there to be a future.
Harris’s words: “I am writing about this now because China today is feeling a lot like Russia in the 1990s. I am getting the sense that many Chinese companies are pessimistic about their futures and they are acting accordingly.”
And: “On top of the economic issues, many Chinese companies have become both wary of and angry at the West, particularly the United States. This too makes things riskier for foreign companies. We are seeing the results of all this in many ways.
Practically every week, one of our China lawyers will get an email or a phone call from someone who bought product from China and received nothing in return or nothing even approaching what they actually ordered. This sending of ‘junk’ instead of real product has spread to pretty much every industry in China.”
Further from Harris: “Sinosure is China’s state-owned export insurance company that pays Chinese manufacturers that were stiffed by their foreign buyers and then seeks to collect from the foreign buyers that allegedly failed to pay. … We are now seeing Sinosure cases where the Chinese manufacturer has made what we think are fraudulent policy claims to Sinosure because they are desperate for cash and they don’t care about maintaining their relationship with their foreign buyer.”
Yet more: “Lastly, our China lawyers are dealing with an increasing number of situations where the Chinese side of a China joint venture has essentially taken over the joint venture and stops communicating with its foreign joint venture partner.”
So Chinese companies are burning their bridges and attempting to monetize the last scraps of goodwill left in the system. They are effectively eating their seed corn. …
In the 1980s I and some mates based around the then Alternative Bookshop – in Covent Garden, a short walk from the Opera House – ran a little thing called the Anti-Soviet Society. We said that Russia should stop being communist and should become a liberal democracy. One-and-a-bit out of two (Russia is now a democracy of sorts but hardly a liberal democracy) ain’t bad. You can never know about such things, but this little enterprise may have shortened the Cold War by as much as a few fractions of a second. I think I still have some pamphlets that it dished out around then.
Time for something similar to be done to the Chinese Communists, who look like they may now be losing the mandate of heaven. Or to put it another way, time for me to find out about such enterprises that already exist, if they do.
To those who say that the Chinese economy now is far more impressive than the Soviet economy ever was, I say: True, but what matters is the direction in which things are heading, or feel like they’re heading, rather than the absolute level of affluence (or lack of it). These Chinese Communists feel to me like they’re losing the future, just as the old USSR did.
A tyranny collapsing always seems impossible. Until it collapses.
LATER: On the other hand … How China Sees the Hong Kong Crisis. He reckons they’re pretty relaxed about it.
Here.