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In my usual stupor, this morning, before all the drugs in my constitutional cup of tea kick-started my ageing brain cells, I watched a snippet of the popular BBC children's programme, Blue Peter.

This is a perennial of tax-funded British programming, imbibed with your mother's milk, which delivers a twice-weekly compendium presented by a rotating set of three bright young things, who tour the world looking for informational opportunities for five to 15 year olds.

When I grew up with the programme these were the splendidly quirky John Noakes, the woodenly hip Peter Purves, and the prim but smouldering Lesley Judd. Ah, the things Lesley could do with a hot wet bucket of clay which would warm the confused cockles of a 12 year old boy.

So I watched this morning's programme with interest. A fresh-faced pretty female presenter wandered around a cocoa plantation in Africa explaining the cocoa pod origins of chocolate production. 'Fascinating,' I thought. There was plenty of factual information and so far a distinct lack of anti-capitalist agitation. 'What is wrong with the BBC, this morning?' I wondered.

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Alas, I think the presenter could feel my disappointment at her failure to take a regressively tax-funded opportunity to try to brainwash British children into becoming politically correct. So just to make me happy she moved up into the BBC's more usual anti-capitalistic gear. This is the essence of what she said next, in front of a group of happy smiling African children:

Now this cocoa farm worker, Mary, only has primitive tools [including a machete and a pole-handled knife] to collect her cocoa pods, which I do find puzzling, but she is happy because she belongs to a co-operative. All the workers here share the co-operative's profits and are funded by the 'Fair Trade' organisation. This means that they have enough money to pay for a water pump and a school for their children. So please make sure that when you buy chocolate it is covered by the 'Fair Trade' logo, to help people like Mary, her family, and all the children you can see here.

Absolutely shameless. Leni Riefenstahl would have been proud of her. The subtext message is, of course, very clear:

Collectivism is good. Free markets are bad. Feel guilty if you buy free market chocolate.

At the end of this bright young thing's piece to camera there was a big smile and then a 'Fair Trade' photo plug for their supported brands of chocolate. This was followed by words of hearty support from an even prettier himbo back in the studio. In fact it seems the Blue Peter report is part of a concerted BBC effort to help the 'Fair Trade' cocoa campaign. That I am coerced into funding this anti-capitalist rubbish is one thing, as hopefully being over 18 years of age I can make up my own mind about such matters, but broadcasting this anti-free market poison to five year olds is morally outrageous.

So just to preserve a smidgin of balance I thought I would try to improve on what the Blue Peter presenter said this morning, particularly as she seemed so genuinely puzzled as to why Mary had nothing more than iron age tools to cut down her cocoa pods:

Now this cocoa farm worker, Mary, only has primitive tools, such as her machete and a pole-handled knife, which at first I found puzzling until I thought about it. I then realised that Mary and her family are kept deliberately poor at a bare subsistence level by two different sets of collectivists. The first corrupt set of thieves are the tyrannical political classes in Africa who routinely steal from their governmentally-controlled populations, via taxation, import tariffs, and export license corruption, to help finance their personal purchases of Swiss gold and to fund their governmental purchases of arms, which they need to keep their own people down. This deprivation by taxation, inflation, and regulation, means that African farmers are never able to save enough re-investment capital to improve their farm production methods beyond subsistence or to increase their revenue to create better lives for themselves and their families. The second group of corrupt collectivists are the politicians in the protectionist blocs, like NAFTA and the EU, who do everything they can through taxation, subsidisation, and import controls, to increase food costs for their own populations and to protect their rent-seeking farmer clients. The resulting western tax revenue is used to give large numbers of these western parasites comfortable secured incomes and to help African tyrants buy even more western weapons systems to further suppress African people through the arms supply mechanism known in these parts as 'international government aid'. So all you five year olds out there, if you really want to decrease poverty in Africa, always try to see beyond the immediately obvious problem and try to discover the underlying causative factors, which will almost always be some kind of government intervention. Free markets feed. Collectivism starves. And now back to the studio.

Now if the BBC were to broadcast that kind of propaganda, then even I would be willing to pay the BBC television license fee.

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Nothing any political body says can be taken at face value. On that point I doubt many would demur. In days gone by when the state had a large measure of control over information flows, this was only to be expected and was easier to do. In modern times, this is a bit harder to pull off and requires 'spin' and other psycho-media exercises in obfuscation to muddy waters, confuse issues, bamboozle and generally misdirect people from politically inconvenient facts. Nevertheless, in this information rich interconnected world in which we now live, one can but marvel that some political creatures seem to act as if they operate in a universe in which the official pronouncements carry the same weight they did in, say, the 1920's.

A remarkable and even bizarre example of this is the summary which has been attached to the factual European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia's report on anti-semitism in Europe. This EU publication comes out against the screamingly obvious backdrop of Islamic youths running rampant in some communities in many countries. And the summary of this report states what exactly?

The largest group of the perpetrators of anti-Semitic activities appears to be young, disaffected white Europeans

Huh? I mean, did they expect that no one would actually read the actual main text? The report clearly says that by far the major source of 'anti-semitic' (meaning anti-Jewish) violence is other semites... Muslim ones.

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Now back in the bad old days when I used to spend time whiling away the hours in the offices of a management consultancy, I recall during one large project the company's managing director urging us to use particular care crafting the six page executive summary of what was a consulting report that stood about three feet high when stacked on a table, because "in reality, no one who matters will ever read the report, they will just skim the summary" (the client, by the way, was the BBC).

Perhaps this baleful ethos has now become the received wisdom in the EU's administrative corridors as well, thus motivating the political masters who oversee such things before they are released to conclude that if they spin the report's summary to direct ire at the usual darlings of the collectivist left (which is to say the collectivist so-called right), no one will actually read the report and realise that a tiny marginalised group of politically invisible shaven headed moonbats with an Adolf Hitler fetish is not the main problem.

To anyone actually reading the whole report its should be clear that the problem is a far larger group of politically highly visible Muslims who are hypersensitive to criticism, even when it is just a statement of demonstrable truth. My suspicion is that the reason for this odd official behaviour is that once the true nature of the problem permeates the consciousness of the pan-European tabloid reading public, entire rickety networks of axioms lovingly constructed and nurtured by several generations of moral relativists could come crashing down like two falling skyscrapers colliding with ugly reality. The issue at hand is not just the small minority of violent Muslim youths, but a broader Euro-Muslim society from which they spring which always suffixes its own criticism of anti-Jewish acts with "but...".

However confronting that would imply that hard political choices lie in the not so distant future. Furthermore, it suggest accepting that whilst races may be equal, societies are certainly not. The two divergent strains of western social evolution are reaching the point at which the differences cannot be papered over. The old blood-and-soil volk is thankfully dead and either we are moving towards a series of legally enshrined cultural ghettos defined by collective rights (multiculturalism) or we are moving towards an melting pot culture of eclectic individual styles and preferences revolving around an emergent common social core (cosmopolitanism). This is not the sort of stark discussion many people want to have amongst either the Paleo-Conservative right or Transnational Progressive left.

Now at first flush, the 'Transnational Progressives' should not see cosmopolitanism as a bad thing, what with their 'let's all come together and sing Kumbayah' ethos. That is until you realise that the whole Tranzi value set is about coming together within the context of a series of mediated political collective 'cultures' and not an individual roll-your-own approach to culture. People who come together but insist on singing 'Rule Britannia' and then think nothing of watching a St. Patrick's Day Parade followed by a nice Vindaloo Curry not only do not compute, they are dangerous if they actually define themselves that way: they (we) are Marx's hated 'rootless cosmopolitans', free from the predictable and ostensibly stable sociological stasis that societies which make a fetish of custom have.

What is more, the cosmopolitans are the evolving expression of the post-tribal extended order about which Hayek wrote. Cosmopolitans, far from being an unintelligible social babble to each other in reality revolve around the same core social values, the same ones which have enabled capitalist trade and several property to flourish. It is the extended order's ability to foster trust and exchange amongst strangers from outwardly dissimilar people's which so threatens the mediated collectivist social model, the same mediated collectivist social model leads to such absurdities as an inability to harshly criticise the Muslim and Euro-Muslim culture which even according to the body of the EU's own report spawns violence against European Jews, not to mention other wider issues such as high unemployment due to an unwillingness to assimilate.

That admission that some cultures are simply less advanced and of less objective value, unable to provide either liberty or affluence, throws into question the whole concept of both relativism (clearly some cultures are not as successful at dealing with reality as others) and collective rights (if some collectives are based on monstrous assumptions, enshrining collective rights enshrines monstrous assumptions) upon which the Tranzi edifice is constructed. That is not a path for discussion which many of the people who preside over regulatory statist systems feel comfortable going down. The real but tiny fascist lunatic fringe has been designated the scapegoat of choice a la the fictional 'Emanuel Goldstein' in 1984: the target of officially sponsored hate. Moreover, any attempts to just use objective social reality to figure out what is going on has to be discouraged or where will it end? Perhaps people might stop believing what they are told by the establishment! I am open to alternative explanations of this strange institutional behaviour however.

The designated badguys



Just misunderstood gardeners!

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Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine
Jasper Becker
Henry Holt, 1998

"The famine of 1958-61 was unique in Chinese history. For the first time, every corner of this huge country experienced hunger (p. 99)," writes Jasper Becker, after setting the scene in the first six chapters of this truly horrifying book. Of all the world's man-made famines - and for more than the last hundred years there has been no other kind - this one was truly the most pointless. The peasants were docile, partly because there had been peace since the Communists had conquered the land in 1949, and partly because they had been systematically intimidated. If the Soviets had needed a famine to crush the Ukrainian peasants, nothing of the sort was needed in China. All the better-off peasants had been eliminated and the rest forced into communes. Despite the fact, a fact theoretically inadmissable, that these were less efficient than the family farms, they were just sufficiently productive to feed those that worked them and the cities which contained around ten percent of the total population.

The Chinese dictator Mao Zedong, having forced through collectivisation, may have decided to persist in the policy to prove Khrushchev wrong when he, in his "secret speech" in 1956, had come close to admitting it hadn't worked in the USSR. Mao in fact, decided to go even further and, preceded by a campaign to raise the peasants' hopes of a Utopian future, initiated his fantasy of The Great Leap Forward. This was something as close to irrational as the Cargo Cults of the South Pacific, where stone-age inhabitants cleared runways in the jungle and awaited the arrival of the transport aircraft they remembered from the War landing and disgorging every luxury of human existence. Though perhaps best known for the "backyard blastfurnaces" that produced useless chunks of iron from the peasants' precious pots and pans, the most destructive feature of the Great Leap Forward was the agricultural disaster produced by the nonsensical theories borrowed from Soviet pseudo-scientists such as Lysenko. The grains that were planted and the density of planting were changed according to his theories, land was abandoned for fallow, bizarre notions about the mixture of manure with rubbish and "deep ploughing" were put into operation and peasants were conscripted to build dams which fell apart and canals which leaked dry or silted up. Since all these innovations were claimed to raise productivity enormously, exaggerated statistics were fabricated and, since everyone believed them, the first harvest was wastefully consumed, though it was, in fact, lower than that of previous years, already reduced by collectivisation.

It is difficult to know how far down from the top of the communist hierarchy the ignorance extended of the true situation as this got worse and worse. As for the Party cadres in contact with the peasants, they were unable to do anything but attempt to obey orders that came down to them, to extract the government share as a proportion of the false figures they had transmitted upward. Senior Communist Party officials travelled to the countryside and discovered what was happening, but merely encountered the dogmatic denial of Mao of what they had seen when they returned. Since he could punish their disagreement with dire penalties, the more honest voiced it in only the most tentative terms, while others simply lied and the whole situation remained deadlocked while the peasants starved. How long it was before Mao's self-deception and bloody-mindedness yielded to a realisation of the facts is not clear, but at the beginning of 1961 he was blaming "counter-revolutionaries and landlords", a formula he could not even have expected to be believed for the famine he now admitted to be happening. There is not the slightest doubt that Mao was responsible for the policies that caused it and for the stubborness that delayed its cessation or amelioration. Not only did he never admit blame, but carried out vendettas against those who brought the famine to an end, one purpose of his initiation of the Cultural Revolution in 1966.

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There is a sense of variations on a theme as the author recounts again and again how in different provinces the peasants attempted to cling to life by eating material with little or no value as food - straw, cloth, leather, bark. Cases of cannibalism, for which there were precedents in China's history, are well attested. Yet there was grain in the state granaries and some was even exported. A special opportunity for starving to death was to be imprisoned in one of the work camps, the Laogai, China's equivalent of the Soviet Gulag, in which some ten million were incarcerated. A number of prisoners, some of them doctors, have left clinical reports of the progressive effect of starvation on the human body; these are not for the squeamish (pp. 200-210). In fact there was little difference for the peasant whether he was imprisoned or not for there was no escape for him from the countryside. The militia turned him back on the roads and he was ejected from the trains. The population in the towns was better off, for they were given rations, though these were meagre, but migration into them from the countryside was forbidden and sometimes their excess inhabitants were ejected into the countryside. The persistent horror and misery of the accounts of these famine years make this a difficult book merely to read.

The last few chapters (17-20) have some of the relief of awakening from a nightmare, though what they have to tell is grim enough. By 1961 there was sufficient party pressure to make Mao, in a series of double-talk statements, abandon his policies and allow the peasants to a certain extent to grow what they wanted. However, he remained alive for another fourteen years, never repudiated the Great Leap Forward and during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) wreaked his revenge on those who had opposed him. China's industrial and infrastructural growth stagnated; the population grew, but food supplies barely kept pace. The average peasant never recovered the standard of living of 1957 until after Mao's death in 1976. All this time other neighbouring nations were making great progress. People may think that China is overpopulated, but its density is only 10 per arable hectare, compared with South Korea's 17.3 and Japan's 23.9 (p. 262).

For years, the famine of 1958-61 was China's best-kept secret. The outside world, even Hong Kong, knew nothing of it. At the time very few foreigners were allowed in and free travel within it was impossible, as much for its inhabitants as for anyone else. 15,000 Russian technicians, on loan from Khruschev, were withdrawn in 1960. Even today, while relatively open about the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese are reticent about the famine. China has never officially acknowledged that the famine took place nor published an estimate of the death toll (p. 266)". How then did Becker come by the material for this book, apparently the first ever published (in 1996) on the subject? In his Foreword he explains his method: Advertisments placed in the overseas Chinese press in 1994 brought hundreds of responses ... I visited some of those who replied ... in Britain ... in the United States, Hong Kong and ... India, where I met Tibetans … Then ... I travelled round rural areas of Henan, Anhui and Sichuan and talked to older peasants who had survived the famine (p. xii)." After more than three decades, memories are still sharp, and the "relative freedom allowed to obscure publishing houses in the provinces in recent years has meant that a surprising amount of material ... has become available."

And how many died, the "hungry ghosts" (a Buddhist term for the most painful route to reincarnation) that fail to haunt the public consciousness? This is the question that Becker attempts to answer in Chapter 18. As has been stated, the Great Leap Forward and the resulting famine have been the great non-event of Chinese history and any analysis of the loss of life has been done by outsiders and exiles, after an examination of the grudgingly released census statistics, of the first under Communism taken in 1953, the third in 1982 and the dubious second in 1964. The result of all investigations would seem to give a lower figure of 30 million and a higher one, comprising all the "unnatural deaths" for which Mao Zedong was responsible, of 80 million, this last vouched for by an former high-up Party member, now an academic at Princeton University, as coming from an official government document (p. 274).

There are few Chinese names here that will mean much to the reader. Deng Xiaoping, the great survivor, inaugurated the economic liberalisation after Mao's death, but must take responsibility for the Tien An Men Square massacre. Liu Shaoqi deserves mention as probably the one who did most to bring the famine to an end, for which he did not escape Mao's vengeance, dying in prison during the Cultural Revolution. Zhou Enlai, for some reason probably the favourite of Western intellectuals, recanted his opposition to collectivization and served Mao faithfully, with minimum dissent, through the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, dying in the same year as his master.

The information about the famine that penetrated into the outside world was meagre and contradictory. The fact that the Communist states of the USSR and China prevented anything like free reporting was so taken for granted that it did not automatically raise the suspicion that a catastrophe was being concealed. The evidence presented to China-watchers in Hong Kong by refugees tended to be discounted by the fact that China was exporting food into the colony. Taiwan might also be assumed to exaggerate any trouble on the mainland. The American press ran occasional stories of hunger and failed harvests, but it does not seem that these were connected with the lunatic policies that had brought them about. Even Joseph Alsop, seemingly the most convinced that something terrible was happening, ascribed the disasters merely to collectivization, just as had been the case in the USSR, though China, he argued, had less of a safety margin. These reports and views were ridiculed by a number of fellow-travelling journalists that the Chinese government used to dupe the outside world: the BBC's Felix Greene (brother of Graham and Carleton), Edgar Snow, long-time supporter of the regime, Wilfred Burchett and Han Suyin. A long list of eminent visitors, including Lord Boyd Orr (retired head of the FAO), Joseph Needham, Sir Cyril Hishelwood (President of the Royal Society), Herbert Read, Field Marshal Montgomery and Francois Mitterand were all blandly lied to and went away satisfied that all was well. Indeed, the Chinese government never admitted there had been a famine at all, far less any responsibility for it, and merely spoke of "natural disasters" that had caused difficulties, a pretext for accepting relief in the course of ending it. There had, in fact, been no natural disasters during the famine years and meteorological records, when ultimately disclosed, showed that the weather had been favourable throughout the entire period.

The whole catastrophe was successfully covered up, a result that deceived western students as much as it benefited communist apologists, and affected books published by both of them well into the nineties. Since all information came from government sources, even anti-communists fell for the "natural disaster" hypothesis, supposedly beaten by maintaining a strict rationing system. In the end, in a quite respectable publication, it was possible to find the statement "that Mao was the first leader to recognize the existence of the famine and to issue orders to rectify the crisis (p. 309)", exactly the opposite of what happened. After all, with little to go on, what could writers assume but that those in power would act rationally? The Great Leap Forward has often been treated positively as "therapy" or "highly educational", not at all as the imposition of nonsensical policies dogmatically claimed to increase productivity enormously, which everyone in charge was then too frightened to deny. Becker also draws the chilling deduction that the worldwide ignorance of Mao's manufactured famine has allowed his methods to be enthusiastically copied in the Third World, with disastrous results. He presents evidence that Pol Pot's genocidal expulsion of Cambodian city-dwellers into the countryside to build collapsible dams and unusable canals was inspired by Mao's social experiment, whose failure was never allowed to come to light.

It would be interesting to know more about the reception of this book than is given in quotations from obviously laudatory reviews on the dustjacket and whether there has been any attempt to refute its thesis since it came out in 1996, or further studies to confirm it.

Lastly, the book is a reminder that, however faulty the political systems under which most of us live may be, and however imperfect those who operate them, Mao's China was incomparably worse.

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In May I am heading off to Las Vegas, where I am speaking at FreedomFest, the year's big libertarian event. Booking tickets today, and looking at lots of pictures of casinos, I was reminded of an article the Liberty Club published a couple of years ago about gambling, money and morals. The author, Conyers Davis, writes:

As I fought my way through the throngs of gamblers in Atlantic City, I could understand why Martin Luther reiterated the phrase that the love of money is 'the root of all evil'. Never in my life have I seen people treat money in so desperate a manner. Gambling on unknown odds, hoping to exponentially increase their wealth as if by magic. It quickly became obvious that the gamblers in Atlantic City do not love or respect money, despite their obvious desire to have more of it. Indeed, they have fallen into a trap that allows it to dictate life's terms to them. These gamblers see money as the answer to all their problems, yet cannot escape the fact that it has become the bane of their existence. Surely, money represents more than this greed of the gamblers. Despite the fallacies that these people attribute to power of money, a positive alternative does exist. Money is one of the greatest physical tools that man has produced and should be openly regarded as such.

As a libertarian, I obviously believe that gambling should be legal. Is it moral? Is there perhaps a difference, morally, between gambling for fun and gambling because of an addiction? Discuss.

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But then I suppose you already knew that. After all, state's often think it is justified to outlaw consensual sex-for-sale (unless it is part of a package involving marriage, of course). Now however, it seems even what you do with your private bits in a non-sexual way is the business of a bunch of priggish regulators.

You think not? Well that is what Georgia's political masters reckon (that is Georgia in the USA not the one in the former USSR). It is now illegal for an adult woman to get a genital piercing. Now I realise that the USA already claims de facto ownership of its subjects (a much more realistic term than 'citizens') even when they wander off to foreign lands, but I though that these notions of owning folks only applied to the fruits of their labour, not their actual bodies (yes, I realise this may be wandering into a touchy area given the USA's interesting history of intrapersonal economic relations, particularly in places like Georgia).

Now if some woman is subjected to non-consensual genital mutilations, I have no problem regarding that as criminal, but will someone tell me how a bunch of legislators can think they have the right to tell a woman what she can do to her own labia and clitoris for her own private aesthetic reasons? To me the law itself is an affront, but far more shocking is that every single one of the members of the Georgia legislature feel they have the right to tell a woman what she may do with her own body for her own private ends.

(via Jessica Lyons: Naturalis)

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The Australian is a national broadsheet newspaper published by Rupert Murdoch's News Ltd, and in terms of quality and direction is fairly similar to the British Times. I suppose. Like any paper it makes the odd mistake, and has to publish a correction. On Tuesday it published the following.

A story headlined 'Syria seeks our help to woo US' in Saturday's Weekend Australian misquoted National Party senator Sandy Macdonald. The quote stated: "Syria is a country that has been a bastard state for nearly 40 years" but should have read "Syria is a country that has been a Baathist state for nearly 40 years." The Australian regrets any embarrassment caused by the error.

Personally I think that if anyone is embarrassed by this, there is absolutely no need for regret whatsoever. But that may be just me.

(Thanks to crikey.com.au for pointing this out).

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In the latest (April 2004 – paper only so far as I can tell) issue of Prospect, there is an excellent letter about private investment in space exploration, from Stephen Ashworth of Oxford, in response to this article by Oliver Morton in the March issue:

Oliver Morton (March) is misleading Prospect readers with his implication that Nasa spaceflight is the only kind that matters. His statement that Nasa's new direction "marks the end of the era in which the goal of spaceflight is to become routine" will be seen in retrospect as the exact opposite of the truth.

The government space agencies' monopoly on manned spaceflight is about to be broken. Twenty-seven industrial teams, mostly in North America and Britain, are competing to be the first to fly private passengers to the edge of space in a commercially-operated reusable spacecraft. Their immediate goal is to win the $10m X prize (see www.xprize.org). In America, aircraft designer Burt Rutan is almost ready to claim the prize. In Britain, Steve Bennett's Starchaser Industries has been building and test-firing large rocket engines and test-flying a reusable piloted capsule, as well as touring schools with Starchaser 4, which in 2001 became the largest rocket ever flown from mainland Britain.

If our civilisation is to make the leap from a one-planet to a multi-planet one, then, just as when it made the leap from a European to a global civilisation, the ultimate drivers will not be government programmes (of Prince Henry the Navigator, Ferdinand and Isabella, Kennedy and Khrushchev). Progress will rather depend upon commercial enterprises which serve public demand (the East India company, the Cunard line, the embryonic space tourist companies).

It would not surprise me if the first astronaut on Mars were not a government employee, but a visionary entrepreneur like Burt Rutan or Steve Bennett, a CEO of a space tourism company with a string of orbital and lunar hotels. That outcome would take much longer than a focused Apollo-style push. But, unlike any past or future Nasa programme, it would not run ahead of the market or the technology in the way that Apollo did.

This letter was worth reproducing in its entirely here not just because it is a good letter, but also because it appeared in Prospect. I like Prospect. It is often leftism, but it is not nearly so often knee-jerk leftism, and often, as here, it is not leftism at all.

I particularly like the comparison between NASA and its political paymasters, and Henry the Navigator and Ferdinand and Isabella. We are told with wearisome frequency nowadays that "technology is moving so much faster these days", but even the time scales of space exploration have an early navigation feel about them.

It will be interesting to read what Dale Amon has to say about this.

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One of the great pleasures and advantages of living in Pimlico, in central London, is its proximity to one of the world's great art galleries, The Tate, a fine classical building looking over the Thames. Recently my girlfriend and I went around two separate exhibitions and had two contrasting experiences not far different in extremes from the North Pole and the Sahara Desert.

The first exhibition was a display of Pre-Raphaelite art, from that group of talented, romantic and at times eccentric group of artists in the middle of 19th Century England. They took their inspiration, as the word pre-Raphaelite suggests, from the Renaissance artist Raphael. Some of them were intensely religious, while others took a passionate interest in the natural world.

I must say I have mixed reactions to their art. Some of the paintings, particularly the coastal seascapes and the depictions of the Swiss Alps, were stunning. Others, while rendered with incredible attention to detail, left me rather cold. There is something almost rather mannered about this art, as if it was produced by someone trying too hard to impress. On the whole, however, I could not fail to be struck by the descriptive lust of these artists, their desire to convey the world as they saw it and as it could be.

And then, after a slurp of wine - we were at a private viewing - we set off to another part of the Tate for an altogether different experience, namely, a selection of 'art' (I will explain the inverted commas a bit later) by some of the world's newest artists, including the so-called enfant terrible of the Brtitish art establishment, Damien Hirst., and Sarah Lucas, about whom I had not heard before.

Some of the exhibits featured dead animals inside tanks containing fluids, bits of sausages, live fish, a brain, bottles of wine, a bucket, and other bits and pieces I could not readily identify. Two exhibits were models of people undergoing surgery, with nothing showing apart from their genitals. Several large oval-shaped boards were covered with hundreds of dead butterflies. An empty full-size truck cab, plastered in its interior with tabloid newspapers, had a man's arm pumping up and down in a familiar sexual act. In fact, several exhibits seemed to portray human bodily functions, as if the exhibits had been assembled by a sniggering, slightly conceited 12-year schoolboy trying to shock his elders.

I will not deny Hirst and others like him are folk with a certain talent. They are talented in much the same way that pickpockets can be said to be talented. But to what effect? So much of his art seems to shout, "I am taking the mickey out of you stupid, repressed middle class wankers"......No doubt Hirst thinks he is being ever so clever and subversive, and judging by the large audiences for his work, he probably is. What perhaps is forgotten is that the image of the artist as the mocker of bourgeois sensibilities, far from being daring and new, is in fact very dated, and bang in line with the ethos of the Modern Art establishment. They are the bores of our age.

There you have it. About 150 years from the Pre-Raphaelites, we have gone from the ability to portray nature with passionate concern for accuracy, and an essentially warm embrace of human life, to lumps of meat in tanks, and to images of human beings sitting on the toilet, smoking a cigarette. Perhaps these folk really have caught the meaning of Blair's Britain, after all.

Addendum: if you are as disgusted as I am by the bogus nature of much modern art, but cannot always put that disgust into words, then I strongly recommend the book, What Art Is, written by Louis Torres and Michelle Marder Kamhi. It unashamedly defends representational art, questions whether certain forms, such as abstract painting, really can pass muster as art, and perhaps controversially, argues that photography does not pass the test. I do not agree with everything in the book but it is well worth the attention.

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The Daily Telegraph ran an obituary yesterday for a man who seems to have been almost the archetype of the corporatist economist.

I must stress that I never met Sir Donald and I am certainly not claiming that he did not love his children, or was not kind to small animals. It is just that he seems to have fit a certain patten of economist.

When Rab Butler (British finance minister at the time) produced a plan in 1952 ("ROBOT") to stop trying to rig the value of sterling on the exchange markets, who leaked the private plan he had been trusted with? Lord Charwell (Sir Donald's boss) and who worked to rubbish the plan (Sir Donald himself).

I have no great affection for fiat money. But if one has such a thing one should not try and rig its value in terms of other currencies - such efforts just lead to crises after crises.

Not that Sir Donald even had any real affection for maintaining the "strong Pound" in terms of the American Dollar. Sir Donald supported devaluation in the 1960s - it was allowing the market (i.e. buyers and sellers - there being no such thing as metaphysical 'market forces' separate from the choices of actual buyers and sellers) to determine the value of the currency (in terms of other currencies) that he seems to have objected to.

Sir Donald got many of the honours and jobs one would expect to come to a man of his type (head of the National Economic Development Council and so on), and the change of government did not harm him.

No, Sir Donald just went to work for the Labour economics minister (George Brown) working on a "national plan" to "plan the economy".

Later Sir Donald went to work for the Confederation of British Industry, which (like the old Federation of British Industry) can normally be expected to support 'moderation' (i.e. statism).

With economists like this, who can blame the public for the lack of knowledge?

It would appear that a careful study of the works of the favoured economists of their time would just leave the public more misguided in their opinions than they already are.

I would be happy to be corrected in my opinion of Sir Donald's working life - but I suspect that I have not been misled by the obituary.

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Recently a commenter here on Samizdata.net used a term that I think sums up modern regulatory statism in the Western World rather well.

Populist Authoritarianism

Whilst Google shows that the term is not exactly new, it does seem both little used and particularly apt. The banning of smoking on private commercial property seems a classic example of this in action. Let's start calling a spade a spade and stop letting the statists of all stripes hide behind euphemisms.

Spread the word.

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Barbara Amiel is someone I frequently find disagreements with but when she is right, boy, is she right. Whilst I am usually rather prone to point the finger of blame at the state as the font of all evils when things go wrong, Amiel makes the reasonable point that even with the best intelligence in the world, the prevailing zeitgeist in the United State (and elsewhere) on and before September 10th 2001 meant that there was very little support for anything which could really have stopped Al Qaeda's infamous arrival onto the world's front pages.

The question is not whether Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush actually knew about the murderous intentions of radical Islam or whether they took what they knew seriously, but what the public mood would have let them do about it before 9/11.

Not much, I wager. What administration could, before 9/11, have sent in American boys to fight a regime in Afghanistan because it was implementing the ideas of an old man with a long white beard, sitting crossed-legged in the mountains talking about Satan America? Had I been in Congress before 9/11, knowing everything that was knowable about the Islamists, I still doubt if I would have voted to send troops to the Hindu Kush to topple the Taliban. Eardrums would have exploded all over Capital Hill from outcries of racism and imperialism if there had been serious efforts, pre-9/11, to round up suspected Muslim militants in the United States and tighten security on Muslims entering the country. As it is, the post-9/11 sensitivity to racial profiling makes travel hazardous for white grannies who dislike body-searches.

All too true. Read the whole article.

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It is galling to read endless utilitarian articles for and against banning smoking on commercial (but nevertheless private) property with nary a mention of whether it is actually just to enact authoritarian proscriptions on the acts of others who are, after all, in voluntary close proximity.

At least the erratic Telegraph takes a fairly good stab at doing just that:

Other politicians throughout Europe will be watching the Irish experiment closely. You can be sure that if the Irish surrender to the new law without a strong show of resistance, it will not be long before a similar ban is introduced in Britain.

So Irish smokers have a responsibility to freedom-lovers everywhere to make their displeasure felt. They have already come up with some ingenious suggestions for exploiting loopholes in the new law. We wish them luck in finding more.

We note that prisons are among the very few workplaces exempted from the ban. So anyone incarcerated in the cause of freedom will at least be allowed the consolation of a smoke.

Light up, Ireland. Do not cooperate in your own repression.

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Gerhard Schröder is calling companies who outsource 'unpatriotic', after Ludwig Georg Braun, the president of the federation of chambers of industry and commerce, advised German businesses to seek opportunities elsewhere.

So, Gerhard Schröder, the man who has presided over yet another interventionist government whose policies have made Germany progressively more and more uncompetitive over the years, brazenly refuses to accept his personal responsibility for imposing the very policies which are driving businesses to seek to invest elsewhere.

But then I suppose as the prerequisite for any professional politician is to be able to look an entire nation in the eye and tell them black is white and up is down, and then ask to be applauded for saying that... and what is more, more often than not, that is exactly what happens.

Whatever. Reality always has its way with vainglorious politicians in the long run because people, and their capital, will eventually go where their interests are best served.

And that place will not be Gerhard Schröder's Germany.

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Let's take some time off away from the gloomy issues of the day to drool over the latest creation of the Ferrari empire. This car looks fantastic.

A four-door car that does 200mph. This model looks particularly good in silver, as is the case with a lot of famous Ferraris. Is capitalism wonderful or what?

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"It is our responsibilities, not ourselves, that we should take seriously."

--Sir Peter Ustinov, who died on Sunday.

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As a dedicated fan of the Australian cricket team, I have been watching them play a series of one day internationals, and Test matches, in Sri Lanka. These matches went very well for Australia and concluded last night. (I write about such things here)

Australia had played a series in Sri Lanka in 1999, and I had watched that also. In contrast to 1999, Sri Lanka looks to be a happier and more prosperous place now then it did back then. From what I could see on the television, the grounds this time were not ringed with military style police, and there was evidence of much new building, infrastructure, and normality.

For example, one of the most prominent advertisers on the grounds was a mobile phone company.

However, the peace in Sri Lanka is under pressure. Some background to the civil war can be read here, and news of latest incidents can be read here. The basic problem is that unity between the two sides in the civil war is breaking down, with dissention in the Tamil Tigers, and also within the Sri Lankan government itself. The President fired the Prime Minister and called for fresh elections. The issues can be read about here, and on first reading, I think Samizdata.net is hoping for the Prime Minister's party to prevail.

The prime minister's United National Party (UNP) wants to press ahead with market reforms and is pressing for free trade agreements with many countries, including the United States, Singapore, Thailand, European Union member states as well as Pakistan and Bangladesh.

President Kumaratunga's party is for a market economy with a 'human face' and has ruled out privatisation of banks, transport and several other utilities. Her ally the JVP wants state control on key sectors of the economy and supports price controls on essentials, and to curb imports of what it considers non-essentials. Both want to offer a plethora of farm subsidies.

The monks' party is for an open economy based on 'Buddhist values'.

I am bemused by the "Buddhist values" of an open economy... and not thrilled to read about farm subsidies! Not enough Sri Lankans are reading Samizdata!

Anyway, if peace can be maintained, I might be able to visit Sri Lanka the next time the Australian cricketers go there. Many Australians went this time, and looked to be having a rousing good time. That sounds like my idea of a good time.

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One of the reasons for slightly less output on this august blog is that two of the editors and the inimitable Gabriel Syme were off meeting other sinister Illuminati in Prague for a fine Czech beer or six.

No prize for guessing where the Illuminati meet in Prague

Prague, like Bratislava, is known for its splendours...

Hot... steamed in fact

One of the upsides of the dire weather was that many of the usually crowded tourist attractions were almost deserted.

We meet one of the leading central European bloggers, Tomas Kohl (on the right)...

Tomas sinks some fine Czech Pilsner with Adriana and Gabriel Syme

Read more.

Tomas told us the best place in Prague to see its famous chicks...

More Prague chicks

Prague is a city in which the splendours of Western Civilisation pretty much kick you in the teeth...

We found a design we really liked for the new Samizdata.net HQ's front door...

The locals know a thing or two about about what makes life great...

... and a thing or two about what makes life suck...

Which perhaps explains the Czech sense of humour...

Read less.

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The government talks a lot about 'investing' in hospitals and schools. That is why we have to pay extra taxes. We all know that New Labour's experiment with spending has been a flop, with the improvements to services tiny compared with the increased spending.

One problem is that the cash we think is going to be spent on operations and classrooms gets diverted. Sometimes this is because of excessive bureaucratic layers, like Local Education Authorities. But sometimes it is rather more blatantly wasted.

Like with government attempts to encourage 'e-society'.

The private sector worldwide has done a really good job at providing opportunities for e-society. Just look at AOL Instant Messenger, webcams, blogs, web site forums, Friendster and Orkut.

But the fact that e-society is so abundantly provided by the private sector has not stopped the UK government thinking it should get involved. Back in the autumn, I got an e-mail from James Crabtree of VoxPolitix asking if I would blog about a new project called MySociety.org, run by his friend Tom Steinberg, a former No. 10 adviser. I have met Crabtree a couple of times and like him, so I thought I should do my bit. I tried for an hour or so to write a blog about this new project, but I just could not. The project was utter crap. And I just could not write anything nice about it with a clear conscience.

Well, that project which I thought was 'utter crap' is now being funded by the government. It has just been awarded £250,000 as "part of something called the e-innovations fund, a pot of government cash set aside to stimulate useful and innovative new online projects".

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Spotted in Friday's print version of the Evening Standard:

Mr Blair's two security advisers, Sir David Omand and Sir John Stevens, tell us each week that such bombs [in public places] are "unavoidable", to exonerate themselves in advance from blame. They tell us to be fearful and vigilant. But they do nothing physically to protect us.

There are no walls going up to block Oxford Street from car bombs. There are no sniffer dogs at Holborn Tube or scanners at the entrance to Trafalgar Square. The citizens of London are being told, in effect, to look after themselves and don't blame the Government. Meanwhile Sir David and Sir John spend millions protecting those for whom they work.
- Simon Jenkins

In other words: You are cannon fodder. The state is not your friend.

Have a cheerful weekend.

With thanks to Guy Herbert