Me at Samizdata, commenting on this, about the bonkersness of North Korea:

No. North Korea is not socialism betrayed. It is socialism done.

Which everyone here knows, but it is worth repeating.

Commenting on that, Perry de Havilland said:

That North Korea is ‘late socialism’ is a meme worth spreading.

Indeed it is.

Duly spread.

A bit.

Various people have been nagging me (a bit) about getting into Twitter, which things like this suit well.  It reminds me (a bit) of when people got contemptuously angry (a bit) because I still didn’t have an email address.

Yesterday, I lived my life, but I am determined, having started, to finish telling you about last Thursday.

So, okay, I have now arrived at Westminster Tube Station.

Most tube stations consist of lots of underground tubes, not just for the trains but also for the people.  Westminster Tube Station is different.

In its original form, it was a regular tube station, made entirely out of tubes.  But then they built Portcullis House across the road from Big Ben and Parliament, the one with the giant chimneys on top, where MPs now have vast new quantities of office space to wreak their havoc.  Many think powerful MPs are a good thing, because they will “hold the executive to account” better, but what they mostly now do is nag the executive to bite off more and more unchewable activity, and complain if the executive ever doesn’t.

While they were building Portcullis House, they combined that with doing a total rebuild of the tube station right underneath it.

And this time around, instead of grubbing about in the ground like moles, they just dug a huge, huge hole, like they do when building any other new building.  Just deeper.

As a result, the process of getting from station entrance to train, or from train to train (what with the station now being an interchange between the District and Circle Line, and the newer Jubilee Line - which is the one I was taking), is as dramatic and theatrical as battling through a regular tube station is grim and demeaning and demoralising.  At Westminster Tube, you now go up and down inside a huge open space, like a department store with no stuff in it, and grey rather than all spangly and coloured.  I love it, even though it has a decidedly fascist feel to it, maybe even because it has a decidedly fascist feel to it.  At least its stylish fascism, rather than just lumpy and cloddish.  But mainly, I think I love it because it is so different from a regular tube station.

While there last Thursday, I only took one shot, namely this:

Had I known I was on a Blogged Odyssey, I would have taken many more shots, of all that dramatic open space with science fictiony structure in among it, supporting the building above and the escalators within, but on Thursday all I thought I was doing was taking the tube.  I would have taken shots like the ones here.  Someone really should set a movie gun fight in this place, don’t you think?  Perhaps they already have.

As for my picture above, it puzzled me for a while.  At first I thought the right-way-round Westminster tube sign was some kind of double reflection, but there is only one sheet of glass involved, so it can’t be that.  In the end I cracked it, metaphorically speaking.  The Westminster tube sign is where it seems to be, but how it looks is confused by the reflection of the wall behind me.  It looks like the sign is projected onto the wall.  In fact, the wall behind me is projected onto the sign.  To the left, you can see the regular wall that the tube sign is actually attached to.

That white circular thing behind me, actually a fire hose I think, looks like a full moon.

Once again, I fear most may not care.  But photographed reflections are a thing of mine.

This afternoon Antoine Clarke and I, all being well, will be having a recorded chat about the US presidential election.

[LATER: Here is the recording.  Not everything went well.  If my computer’s response is anything to go by, you will hear this through only one speaker, and in somewhat imperfect sound.  But nobody listens to BrianMicklethwaitDotCom sound files to be knocked out by their superb sound quality.  What we both say is audible, and the good news is that the file is far smaller than usual.  I hope that, if you listen, you enjoy it.  It lasts just under 45 minutes.]

Meanwhile, here is another attempt to embed a video here.  This time it’s John McCain, talking about just how badly Obama screwed up this Benghazi business.

That got shown on CBS.  How many people have watched it, or will watch it before the election, I have no idea.  The importance of this and all the other Obama scandals is not that they are scandalous, but whether or not large numbers of Americans are hearing about them.

I have been speculating that the “mainstream” media would maybe desert Obama.  Well, a few people in it are expressing doubts, but on the whole media bias has never been more blatant and brazen.  This is because Obama is, far more than any previous Democrat, their perfect candidate.  Hard left, and determined to inflict (in a thoroughly bad way) fundamental change on America.  I really want these media people to get the kicking of their lives.

Obama’s enemies are still trying to sort out whether they think Obama is merely crass by nature, or evil on purpose.  We may never know.  Successful people (and Obama has been very successful by most measurements) do what they are best at.

I cannot for the the life of me see how re-electing Obama could possibly be anything but a giant act of folly and self-destruction on the part of America.

The BBC, by the way, are still saying that this election is a dead heat.  Or this is what they said on the 9am news bulletin on Radio 3, just before CD Review last Saturday.  Others say Obama is going to get landslided.  I think landslide, but ... we shall see.

If the video isn’t working properly, please let me know.  Not that I will then know what to do, but it will influence my enthusiasm for further such attempts.

Well, well. I just added, to the posting below, this:

Actually, I think I got the first two sentences of the paragraph above wrong.  It should read: “What polls tell you is not what voters are thinking.  They tell you what the pollsters think the voters are thinking”.  What I actually put is indeed “not entirely true”.  This explains, I think, and as my original version does not, why pollsters don’t get the result right, but do get right the direction in which opinion is heading at any particular moment, which, as I introspect, I have been letting them tell me about.  Because they do get that right. The misleading samples of people that the pollsters each talk to include a few who change their minds, and the pollsters do pick up on this.  So, now, the pollsters are getting right that opinion is flowing steadily away from Obama and towards Romney.  But at no stage in this process did, or do, or will they register how bad things were, and are, and will be, for Obama.

And mere hours later, I read this:

One way of avoiding this error is to look at the same poll over a long period of time.  The numbers themselves might be off, but as long as the same flawed methodology doesn’t change, you should still be able to pick up trends.

Indeed.

But he’s not even sure that Obama will lose, although he definitely inclines that way.  I incline that way more and more definitely with every day that passes.

And now, it seems I’m only one of a stampede.

Already, I am turning my mind to a piece about Romney, entitled something like: Okay, he’s going to win, but then what?

I now think Romney is going to win big.  Part of why I think that is captured in point 2 in that graphic, which I found here.  No one has to know.

In particular, the pollsters do not have to know.  I think the polls have, all along, been wrong about this election, wronger than ever before.  The polls are not being told what people have been, are, and will be thinking.  The polls were wrong when they said Obama was walking it.  They are wrong now that they are saying it’s close.  They will be wrong when they say Romney will just about win, as they soon will.  But on the day, in the real poll, Obama is going to be slaughtered.  Romney will win all the “battleground” states and several which are not now even thought to be in contention.

What polls tell you is not what the result will be.  They tell you what the pollsters think the result will be.  How do they know what they know?  Same way I do.  They guess.  (In this respect, poll results remind me of economic models.) Okay that isn’t entirely true.  I myself factor in what the polls say when I make my guesses.  But the polls are sufficiently wrong to be very wrong indeed, for an event that can be bent into a completely different shape by single figure percentage point errors.

[LATER: Actually, I think I got the first two sentences of the paragraph above wrong.  It should read: “What polls tell you is not what voters are thinking.  They tell you what the pollsters think the voters are thinking”.  What I actually put is indeed “not entirely true”.  This explains, I think, and as my original version does not, why pollsters don’t get the result right, but do get right the direction in which opinion is heading at any particular moment, which, as I introspect, I have been letting them tell me about.  Because they do get that right. The misleading samples of people that the pollsters each talk to include a few who change their minds, and the pollsters do pick up on this.  So, now, the pollsters are getting right that opinion is flowing steadily away from Obama and towards Romney.  But at no stage in this process did, or do, or will they register how bad things were, and are, and will be, for Obama.  End of LATER.]

We shall see, etc.

Debate Two between Obama and Romney has now become about whether Obama can win by a knockout.  Maybe he can.  But, he won’t.

Romney’s final burst of adverts will have further impact.  Obama’s adverts have accomplished little.  They said Romney isn’t likable, is a right wing nutjob, etc.  Debate One negated this message.  They said something about “Big Bird”.  Ridiculous.  But that doesn’t prove that adverts accomplish nothing, by their nature.  Just as in the debates, and unlike Obama, Romney (and Ryan) have plenty of persuasive things that they want to say.

In a comment on this, I noted that the TV Umpire lady in the Vice President debate did Biden no favours by allowing him to behave so very badly.  Had she told him early on to stop his giggling and interrupting, Biden might well have won that debate.  But give TV Umpire lady her due, she did at least interrupt Ryan, whenever his speeches were starting to sound too eloquent.

But Romney’s adverts can correct that, by saying everything Team Romney now wants to say, and which the mainstream media have until now stopped them saying by less expensive means.  And, they can use the exact words which will work best.

Plus, Team Romney will have, I believe, another two debates worth of Obama waffle to use, like they have already used Biden’s laughing.

Like Jim Bennett said:

John, let me suggest that the criteria for victory are changing. The debate no longer ends when the debaters walk off stage. And now it no longer ends when the TV spinners have, like cuckoos, laid their eggs and flown away. There is now the long, long reverberation in social media, where the basic debate footage serves as raw material for mash-ups and parodies and treatments for the rest of the election cycle and beyond. And Biden’s performance, which won him some tactical advantage in the debate, has set him up as the target for rich satire and a way that Ryan’s conventional performance didn’t and cannot do. His performance is comic gold, and although within hard-core Dem/left circles he will be celebrated as the warrior, everywhere else, and especially for basically apolitical young YouTube viewers, he will be the jackass supreme. I suspect that by Election Day, the various parodic videos will have had a larger viewership than the debate itself. By this criterion, the tactic was a massive miscalculation.

If the same thing happens to Obama, between now and the election (I believe it will), he really will be slaughtered.

But … we shall see.

LATER: Mitt Romney in a landslide.

I stayed up, not so much to watch the Vice Presidential Debate, as to see what would be made of it by others, most especially the BBC.

The BBC’s lady with big blond hair said (a) that it was too close to call, but then (b) called if for Ryan.  Two reasons for making Ryan the winner.  One, Biden had to win, to get some momentum back for Obama.  A draw was enough for Ryan.  So Biden actually lost.  Two, Biden actually did lose, because of all his smirking and interrupting and condescending.  Biden did all that wrong.  Ryan did nothing wrong.  So, Ryan won.

The BBC agreed, in other words, with PJTV drunk blogger Steven Green, who also had Ryan winning.  It’s not a knockout, but it is a win.

My personal take?

At first I was rather impressed by Biden, but then I started to find his air of forced merriment unsuitable for the grim things he was arguing about.  I was glad to see that others thought that too and that it wasn’t just me.

Biden was the more obvious “performer”.  Which is not good.  He was the one trying to create an atmosphere, like an old school stage actor.  Ryan seemed more himself.  Which could just mean that Ryan is a better performer.

Because Ryan was defending while Biden attacked, it looked like Ryan was the actual Vice President, defending four defendable years of him being Vice President and Romney being President, rather than Romney and him being the challengers.  But that may have been because I had the sound switched off for quite a lot of it, while I read other stuff.

If you had seen those two faces in a thirties or fifties political movie, you’d have said Ryan was the young brainy lefty Democrat, while Biden was the old country club Republican President.  But old Republican President is not the persona you want for an attack.

As it was, Young Ryan was under pressure from both Old Biden and the big blond American TV lady.  Ryan kept his cool.  He proved himself a better guy than lots of those watching may have realised.  The general American opinion of Ryan will surely go up, even if only a bit.  He was under big pressure.  He did not buckle.  He was the one who proved he had the Right Stuff.

I participated in an interesting exchange today at Samizdata, on the subject of this posting, about why I support the Tea Party.  But the exchange came towards the end of a longish, and nearly dead now, comment thread, so few will read it, and I at least want to remember what was said.

“bradley 13”:

I disagree with this article for one main reason: the Tea Party has been nearly entirely co-opted by the social conservatives. The small-government folks seem to accept this as a necessary compromise, without realizing that they have lost control of the movement.

If you took a poll of people identifying themselves with the Tea Party, you would find that religious issues (abortion, gay marriage, etc.)) are more important than government spending.  From an article from 2011: “Tea Party supporters … are much more likely than registered voters as a whole to say that their religion is the most important factor in determining their opinions on these social issues.” (Emphasis mine)

Farther down in the same article: 42% of Tea Party supporters agree with the conservative Christian movement, while 11% disagree. The remainder are somewhere in the middle, but the dominance is clear.

The Tea Party was a great idea, until the religious zealots got ahold of it ...

My response:

bradley 13

Some of what you say is obvious and not bad news at all.  None of what you say is definitely bad news.

Much depends, in surveys, on what questions are asked.

It’s obvious that Tea Party Christians get their social issue opinions from their Christianity.  Who has ever doubted it?  This does not prove that they will use the Tea Party primarily to spread or to enforce these Christian views to or upon others.

Even the claim that they take social issues more seriously than government spending, though suggestive of what you are arguing, does not prove it.

If any question had asked: What do you think the Tea Party is for?  Cutting government spending?  Or: propagating (or even enforcing) Christian values?  Then, the answers would be interesting, and very troubling if the Christians mostly said: For propagating and enforcing Christian values.  The government spending stuff is just something we say, in order to spread Christianity.

But a quick read of the piece you link to tells me that no such question was asked, or if it was, the answers was not reported.  What this survey seems to be about is what else Tea Partiers tend to believe, besides believing in the Tea Party.  Nothing in it surprised me, or lowered, or even altered, my opinion of the Tea Party.

By the way, not only am I a libertarian, I am also a strong atheist.  I think Christianity is not just untrue.  I think that Christian beliefs about such things as the virgin birth and the meaning of the crucifixion of Christ are downright daft.  If I thought that the Tea Party was either founded to create a Christian theocracy or if I ever think in the future that it has degenerated into such an enterprise (as it certainly might), I would not merely stop supporting it, I would, for whatever difference it would make, oppose it.  Meanwhile, what seems to unite Tea Partiers now is, see my posting, the belief that the US government does too much, spends too much and borrows too much, and making that idea stick is what the Tea Party is for.  Nothing in this survey says otherwise.

I agree that Christians loom very large in the Tea Party, but Christianity is not the Tea Party’s publicly agreed purpose.  As of now, I remain optimistic that whereas most Tea Partiers seem to be Christians, and as such profoundly influenced in what they think by their Christianity, these Christians do not think that the purpose of the Tea Party is to spread Christianity, and that the government spending stuff is just a front.

If your response to that is: well, of course they wouldn’t say that.  My response to that would be that nothing is this survey settles that particularly argument about what these Christians are trying to accomplish one way or the other.  Are you aware of any other evidence that Christian Tea Partiers are actually engaged in a huge deception of this sort?  I am not, but that proves very little.  What I do know is that your link does not supply such evidence.

An analogy.  The libertarian movement seems to consist largely of men.  (It’s certainly that way in London.) But this absolutely does not mean that the libertarian movement’s purpose is to spread the idea of male domination of the world generally.  To say that “libertarianism has been taken over by men” is sort of true, in the sense that it is indeed mostly men.  But as an attempt to describe what the men in the libertarian movement are really trying to accomplish, such an observation would be seriously misleading.

As yet there has been no reply, and probably there won’t be.  That’s not itself any sort of argument.  Just because you had the last word, if you did, that doesn’t mean you won.  Merely that communication ceased.

More to the point, if there is any news or evidence that Tea Party Christians are indeed trying the old Popular Front routine rather than supporting the public agenda of the Tea Party in good faith, I would very much like to learn about it.

I am a godless supporter of gay marriage, but I do love this, not just because it says Don’t Vote Obama, but because it says it so eloquently.  He is such a great speaker.

Proof that eloquent speaking straight to camera is more than good enough for the YouTube age.

Thanks, yet again, to Instapundit.

If I were a betting man, which I am not (or only in the form of blog postings like this one), I would bet that Obama is not just going to lose his forthcoming election, but lose it big.  I am not that confident about what follows, which is why it goes here rather than here).  It may be wishful thinking, but it is what I have been thinking, and I wanted to get it written down, so that later I can’t strengthen it in my mind if I am right, or blur it if I am wrong.

This guy also thinks this, as do others I have read saying it but have now forgotten the names of.

Of my immediate circle, Michael J has already commented, here, to the effect that he now sees no evidence of a landslide, and that Romney will probably win, but small.  What do others of the sort inclined ever to comment at this tiny little ticking-over personal blog think about this?

My reasons are, in no particular order (this is only a tiny little ticking-over personal blog):

The polls are bent towards Obama, by Democrat intimidation.  The Dems calculate that if they can persuade Repubs that Romney will lose, some Repubs will say what’s the use? - and stay home.  Voters love a winner and are less likely to vote for a loser, or so I keep being told.  No doubt this will diminish the Repub vote a bit, but not enough to make the polls an entirely self-fulfilling prophesy.  They are still several percentage points out.

The polls are also out by personal inclination.  Most of the people who work for these operations are Dems, because Dems are obsessed with politics, Repubs less so.  Repub kids get proper jobs like lawn mowing or pool cleaning, or if grown-up, they get actual proper jobs doing regular round-the year stuff for serious money, and if not that is what they are trying to do.  These Dem pollsters hear, even if they genuinely try not to, what they want to hear, not least because people tell them what people think they want to hear.

Polls have, in general, been getting ever more inaccurate, as people learn that they can say whatever they hell they like to pollsters, most definitely including nothing.  Even the ones sincerely determined to resist pro-Dem bias are still biased thus, somewhat.

In particular, this time around, people still don’t know how to answer the accusation that being anti-Obama is racist.  Which is why the Dems keep on using this accusation.  People know it isn’t so, but are unpractised at making the necessary subtle distinctions.  So, to avoid some presumably pro-Obama person even thinking they are racist, they either lie, or fluff, rather than speak their minds.

All of these polling distortion effects are quite slight, but each is enough to ruin a process where one or two per cent can make all the difference.  But, crucially, almost all these effects now point in the same direction.  That’s a big effect.  I think the polls will be more wrong this time around than ever before.

The economy is not good, and Obama has no story about how to improve it.

In particular, the economy is horrible for young educated people, the ones who voted for Obama in their millions last time around.  These people are pissed off, big time.  Quite a lot will blame Obama, and will stay at home.  Some, under the influence of cool libbo Ron Paul memes, may even switch to Romney.  Many are ashamed of how they voted for Obama with such enthusiasm last time, and are not telling the pollsters about this.  (See above: the polls are very wrong.)

Obama is pissing all over the Jews.  This never works.

The bias of the mainstream media is becoming more obvious now, to a lot of American people.  Last time, media bias went with the grain of American opinion, and the media have thus had eight uninterrupted years to degenerate into blatant propaganda operations, and the internet has had eight years to tell everyone that this is so.  More than ever before, media bias is now believed in .  Again, a matter of degree.  But like I say, these degrees all add up.  In particular, more now distrust those predictions of Obama victory, and will accordingly refuse to be influenced by them into not bothering to vote.

Romney is not nearly as big a jerk as a lot of disappointed Libbos and Conservatives seem to think, or as Dems hope.  He keeps on winning.  I think he will do much better in the debates than most others seem to, because he has a story to tell, to and about an opponent who does not.  Romney is indeed not a genius debater, but he knows it, and knowing also that he is winning, he will prepare hard and go in with exactly the right amount of and kind of confidence, like a winning sportsman.  He will surprise many by how well he does.

Meanwhile Obama, surrounded by yes men, and fatally arrogant, and tired, a fed-up and probably knowing he is going to lose, and having nothing to say, will not prepare well enough for the debates.  He faces a near-impossible task, and will not be up to it.

The Dinesh D’Souza movie is hurting Obama, as will stuff like this (Arab money and support to pay for Obama’s career).  Americans are now ready to be told what sort of man Obama really is, this time around.  First time around, they just voted for the cool black guy, on the grounds that it was damn well time America had itself a cool black guy as President.  This time, policies and opinions will count, along with the (very bad) record of the last four years.  Obama’s policies and opinions are hurting and will continue to hurt him.

Romney is a cunning bastard politician.  His campaign will not only consist of the damaging things about Obama that he himself says.  He probably will stay fairly positive.  But the negative stuff will get out there, like that Arab money thing.

Romney now has a ton more money than Obama has.  Obama has spent most of his trying, and failing, to stay in the race.  Romney is about to spend similar quantities drawing ahead.

At some point between now and the election, some who now want Obama to win and are still propagandising for him will realise that he will not win, and will say why, if only to keep their own credibility in place, a bit.  They will want, as the saying goes, to keep (some of) their powder dry, in order to (e.g.) trash President Romney and all his works.  Obama will respond to these betrayals not with a spirited public rebuttal, but with a resigned shrug, which also will not look good.  (A public meltdown is probably too much to hope for, but I hope for it nevertheless.) How pronounced this effect will be is very debatable.  Maybe very obvious, maybe almost undetectable, but it will, to some degree happen. Already, to a tiny degree, it is happening.

Well, that’s enough to be going on with.  I just wanted to place my little bet, so that if it turns out right I can say: I told you so.  But much of the above is guesswork, so, Americans (especially Americans but also all others), please feel free to tell me I am wrong.

And then, we’ll see.

None of the above says that I think that this is the most important political battle in the world right now.  Its only major importance would be if Obama were to win.  But when (I think) Romney wins, the big questions will remain.  How bad are things going to get?  How unbadly can President Romney be persuaded to handle them?

For me, the big hero of all this is absolutely not Romney, or even Paul Ryan.  It is the collective hero that is the Tea Party.

Some of Michael J’s better bits of writing, as regular readers here will know, take the form of comments.  Knowing that a few people at least are interested in the topic in question, and knowing something about it (Michael knows something about everything), he often finds himself then able to let fly, as he might not be able to do in a regular blog posting.

Here’s the latest MJ comment, on this, which is by Rob Fisher, about taxies:

At Skopje airport in Macedonia last year, I found the worst regulated taxi mafia I have ever seen, and that is saying something. Not only is there no public transport of any kind into the city from the airport, regular taxis are not allowed to pick up passengers from the airport either. There is a special class of horrendously overpriced “airport taxi” that is the only way of getting into town from the airport. When I arrived in Skopje last year I was approached aggressively by half a dozen of these taxi drivers as I walked out at the terminal.

This pissed me off. I had already found out about their scam (and knew that they were likely to charge me something like 25 to 30 euros to get into town), but their being rude and aggressive to me as well annoyed me. (Note to foreign touts trying to sell me stuff when I am visiting your country - I do not like it when you keep trying to sell me something after I have said no, and I *really* do not like being shouted at. Being in a situation where the people selling you something have done their best to make it impossible to prevent you from buying it does not lead to high standards of customer service, generally, either. The supposed justification for this taxi mafia is probably so that foreign visitors will receive a “high standard of service”, I suspect).

So I walked out of the carpark towards the road. The taxi drivers followed me halfway out of the carpark, but eventually figured out that I meant it. I had downloaded local maps onto my iPad, and I knew that there was a town perhaps half to three quarters of a mile away, and that this was on a long road connected to several other towns and the centre of Skopje. I walked down the side of the busy road and past the field full of ageing NATO military equipment that had been brought for some use in Kosovo and after a half hour or so reached the town and road on the map. My guess was correct, and there was a bus stop on that road, and people waiting at the bus stop. (There were also bars, restaurants and grocery stores in the town, that were open). I waited a few minutes, a bus came along, and caught the bus into town. The fare was about 40 cents. The bus driver was warm and friendly.

Amount of effort required for the local bus company to offer a service to the airport? Essentially none at all - that existing bus route would merely need to divert briefly to the airport. However, the airport taxi mafia was clearly powerful and well connected enough to prevent this. First impression given to foreign visitors by all this: Skopje is a town full of rude, nasty rip off merchants. (As is often the case, most locals are not actually like this, but not a good first impression. This really did not give me a high opinion of the quality of local governance, however).

Heaven knows who you have to be related to be to get one of these airport taxi licences though.

(And if I had not found a bus route? Well, as long as those bars, grocery stores and restaurants had in fact existed and been open, I am sure that there would have been no trouble if I had gone into one of them and asked a barman or cashier how to find a taxi. The “taxi” in question might well have ended up being a private car driven by the barman’s brother in law, but the negotiated price would have been much fairer).

One of the best things about blogging is that you can vent about things that really, really annoy you.  if it’s a business which needs customers to do voluntary business with them, who knows, they might do regular ego-googling and get your message, while fearing that others might be getting it too.  Things might improve.  Your rant might improve the world for all of us, a tiny little bit.  Good.

If it’s the government, which the above circumstance is, pretty much, you can at least tell the bastards, and the rest of the world, what you think of think of them.  This too is soothing.  Also good.

This idea (alluded to in my previous posting about my comments system here) of readers digging up old comments and admiring them is no joke, as regular Samizdata commenter “llamas”, obligingly and entirely coincidentally, and after most of that previous posting had already been written, says, in a comment on my latest posting at Samizdata (which is about Obama potentially losing both (a) the US mainstream media and consequently (b) the plot and his rag in public).

Says llamas:

(puffs out chest) I actually predicted a lot of this, right on these very pages, almost 4 years ago

See what I mean.  Others may not care what you wrote four years ago, but you might.  And you might want to dig it up, llamas style, and say: I told you so.  Okay maybe you only told the world whatever you told it in comment number three (of three) in a posting here about kittens, but … you did say it.  You genuinely were thinking that, then.  You are not just saying it now, and imagining it now.  You aren’t making it up.

Here, just out of interest, is some of what llamas said, on November 5th 2008, about what was in Obama’s future:

Once the voters actually start getting what they voted for, ‘good and hard’, I think there will be a backlash that will make 1994 look like a walk in the park. If there is a really-good foreign-policy crisis in the mix - even sooner. Obama simply does not have the leadership, the skills or the experience to impose himself or his ideas on the nation in any significant way. He is Pelosi and Reid’s tame poodle, and as they go, so will he.

I saw a piece of video (widely re-broadcast) that shows an Obama supporter crying that now she won’t have to worry about her mortgage, won’t have to worry about putting gas in the car anymore - if she helps Him, He’ll help her.

Well, come about May, when her mortgage bills just keep on coming and the tank of her car does not magically refill, she’s going to be asking - where’s mine? And when she then sees her net income go down - she has a job, ergo, she’s going to pay more taxes in ObamaDemocratWorld, and the price of gas does not go down, and her 401k is still in the tank ... you see where I’m going with this?

President-elect Obama has promised to solve all of the world’s problems. Every one. It’s right there in his speeches. We’re all going to be happy and prosperous together. He said so.

And when he fails to deliver - as he must, since he has no actual power to do any of what he promised to do - and when the Congress starts to do what it REALLY had in mind all the time - the balance will change, quick and hard.

It will be hard days getting there. But the pendulum always swings back to center, and the further from center that it has been dragged - as it was yesterday - the hard the swing back.

I’m starting to think that Obama is going not just going to lose this November, but be wiped out.  But that could just be wishful thinking on my part, and in the event that Romney does win, even if by a landslide, then his troubles will have only just begun.

Basically, my take is that, yes, Romney has to win, but then the Tea Party has to keep him on the straight and narrow.  It’s a lot to ask.

Kitten blogging from Delingpole:

Among the report’s findings are that large scale industrial wind farms can:

...

Rescue drowning kittens from sacks in canals and lead them to secure, happy homes where they are well cared for in handcrafted wicker baskets with lovely, snuggly faux-sheepskin blankets for them to purr on and little saucers of organic Jersey cream designed by Cath Kidston.

Whoever she is.  This, apparently.

The enviro-argument has reached an odd stage.  Day after day, enviro-non-loonies like the increasingly contemptuous Delingpole pound away at enviro-looniness.  Yet because the Cameron Government is a coalition, founded on a deal to do (among other daft things) enviro-looniness, the government just ignores all the complaints, merely cutting the sillier enviro-schemes by small amounts, but leaving the basic looniness to continue.  Yet the public must be noticing.  They are paying the mad energy bills.  They, some of them, must be reading about all the corruption (YeoGummer, etc.).  The entire Conservative Party is disgusted and in the mood to vote UKIP en masses.  The top end of the Labour Party says nothing, because they believe in enviro-looniness also, yet their massed members must be disgusted by YeoGummer.

So, nobody is happy.  The enviro-loonies aren’t getting as much public money as they had hoped for.  Many of the rest of us still think they’re getting far too much.

It’s one of those situations where, as Instapundit would say, it if can’t last for ever, it won’t.

But maybe it will.

More enviro-blogging from Natalie, here.

Incoming from Jackie D (I particularly like this):

I want to live here!

Here being here:

Incoming from Michael J (I particularly like this):

It’s Mumbai though. They will only ever finish half of it, and there will be a slum in the location where they want to build the second swimming pool that they cannot do anything about.

In a way, this would be good. In China, the slum would be demolished and the people living in it would be relocated 3000 miles into the middle of the desert at gunpoint. So there are different ways of doing it.

Incoming from Michael J:

This is right in the middle of Malabar Hill, the poshest address in Mumbai and some of the most expensive real estate in the world. Everything in India is next to everything else.

Incoming from Michael J:

Not a great photo, alas, but there is a sign at the entrance to the slum saying that this is in fact a co-op. housing society (proposed). The nearby rich residents have clearly decided that the slum should be demolished and replaced with something nicer and less unsightly for the residents to live in and to make the neighbourhood prettier. But this being India, it remains forever proposed.

A sane way of dealing with this situation would be to give the residents of the slum legal title to where they live. They could then sell it to developers, and use the money from it to build themselves palatial houses elsewhere. Everyone would then be better off.

Unfortunately, Indian bureaucracy is too stultifying for this to happen, and in addition Mumbai itself is too corrupt for it to happen in a fair way. Even if it could happen legally, gangsters would find a way to steal the money.

Micklethwait’s Law number about seven states that if you want to cheer yourself up about your own country, ignore your own country and look instead at all the others.

Here:

“This is a guy who literally is walking around in a dark room trying to find the light switch of leadership.”

Ouch, says Instapundit.  Indeed.  But what Instapundit means is that this denunciation of President Obama by New Jersey Governor Chris Christie really hits home.  I don’t think the pain he feels is caused by that “literally”.

Literally used to mean: this is not a metaphor.  Now literally means: I am really serious about this metaphor and I really want you to listen.

Incoming, from Nicholas I. Kierniesky, to the Samizdata team:

Says Perry de Havilland:

Excellent :-)

Indeed.

Talking of Jobs, Michael J recommended this, about the good one of the three.  I still haven’t read it, but have been carrying the print-out with me on my travels.  I will read it, Real Soon Now.

As for all the irreverences now circulating about Obama, well, like it says, it’s the economy.

If Romney wins, will he also be a one term President?  Worse, far worse, if that happens, would Samizdataism, so to speak, get the blame?