And the first thing I photoed yesterday was newspaper headlines, about Britain’s Envy-of-the-World NHS.  Those first three were literally the first three snaps I took yesterday, and the last one was photoed later, at London Bridge Station, more about which later, I hope.

Read, and be amazed:

I honestly cannot remember a day when Britain’s NHS has ever, ever had a worst press than it had yesterday.  (The same stories had been all over the telly on Wednesday evening also.)

I hope to write at greater length at Samizdata about these dramas, connecting it to my Alpha Graphs stuff, but promise nothing

The basic idea being that a nationalised industry collapses not when it merely starts deteriorating, but only when it is deteriorating so fast that a switch to the free market, although horrible, would be no worse even in the short run.  And of course massively better in the long run.  But it’s the short run that matters because it is during that short run that you or your elderly loved one dies, through being left out in a corridor or some such horror.

Libertarians are prone to assume that things like the NHS are untouchable, merely because people continue to swear by them when they are getting only somewhat worse.  Brainwashed fools!  They will never see sense!  But they are seeing sense.  And then suddenly, to the amazement of libertarians, they do suddenly see sense.  Actually, just a bit more sense, along with the sense they had already been seeing.

See also: collapse of the USSR.

The NHS has a bit of a way to go before it folds, because people are still at the stage, as you can tell from these headlines, of thinking that sacking the Boss and installing a New Boss would turn things around.  But, any year now ...

When you want to write a big old piece about Something Important, it’s not a bad idea for a blogger to rip out a little piece about it in the meantime, in a single figure number of minutes.  That at least gets the meme out there and gives it a chance to propagate, even if a bigger piece at Samizdata would do that better.

Whenever, of a Friday, I go looking for cat news, there is always plenty. 

Pride of place today goes to the news that the New York shooter loved his two cats.  But, it is now argued, by some different scientists to the scientists who argued the opposite, that he can’t have caught brain cancer from his cats, because that doesn’t happen.  Good to know.  But, you might be driven by your cats to commit suicide.  How about murder?

On the other hand, Cats that pester for food could be suffering from psychological condition.  Yes.  They’re cats.

News of a cat that is making itself useful: Cat opens new excavator plant in Texas.  That must have been something to see.  What did the cat say?  Did it just chuck a champagne bottle against the side of the excavator plant?  Is there video of this?

TWO men appeared at Hereford Magistrates Court this morning charged with robbing a man in the city while dressed as cats.

Next up, the encouraging news that M12 Cat 6A connector system delivers signal integrity up to 10Gbps.

And, in Israel, new born and very rare (apparently) sand kittens, like this one:

Finally, two feline related bits of compugraphics which, according to Instapundit, went viral last week, in connection with Pussy Riot and Maths (which Americans can’t spell).

I actually don’t think the one on the right is very good.  The cat connection is imposed, not explained.

Here’s another of those horizontal slices I like to do.  It’s from one of these photos:

Which was one of the things linked to in the latest of David Thompson’s Friday ephemera.

See also these awesome frogs, which really are awesome.  The harlequin tree frog, which looks like some kind of liquorice based sweet, has a mouth whose inside is blue.  Frog number 6, not named for some reason, is entirely blue, but that looks comparatively normal.

The reed frog, on the other hand, in its extreme decorative implausibility, reminds me of this hippo.

One of the pleasures of blogging is that you learn about new and interesting blogs from comments on existing blogs.  From a comment on this posting which I recently did for Transport Blog, I learned of this blog, which is something to do with some kind of broadcasting venture.  Not sure what kind of broadcasting venture.  More research is needed on that.

And, feeding into a recent interest of mine, there is a recent posting there, featuring a couple of Soviet era Health and Safety posters:

Judging by the blogroll, I should have alerted myself to this blog long ago.  And the fact that whoever did this posting found these posters via David Thompson’s blog (one of my favourites), and found them interesting, suggests that he and I are even more on the same wavelength, aesthetically and culturally as well as merely politically.

I’ve spent most of my blogging time this weekend editing an interview I did earlier in the week.  But I’m glad I found time to read this, which was, however many minutes or hours ago it was, then linked to by Instapundit and is now being read everywhere that the truth about the evilness of those who tried to excuse the horrors unleashed by Marxism is understood.  I.e. not in most parts of most Anglo-Saxon universities.  In places where thinking straight about things is the rule.

The internet is changing everything.  The rules about what can be said and read have changed.  Changed so much, I believe, that it is taking time for everyone, wise and foolish, good and bad, to realise it.  New methods of communication are always like this, if my reading about earlier communicational dramas is anything to go by.

The important thing is to go for the morals of the Marxists.  They were and are not just wrong as in mistaken.  They were and are wrong as in wicked.  Not least, they were wicked because of how persistently they bashed on with their mistakenness.

Pejman Yousefzadeh quotes David Pryce-Jones:

A mystery peculiar to the twentieth century is that intellectuals were eager to endorse the terror and mass-murder which characterized Soviet rule, at one and the same time abdicating humane feelings and all sense of responsibility towards others, and of course perverting the pursuit of truth. The man who sets dogs on concentration camp victims or fires his revolver into the back of their necks is evidently a brute; the intellectual who devises justifications for the brutality is harder to deal with, and far more sinister in the long run. Apologizing for the Soviet Union, such intellectuals licensed and ratified unprecedented crime and tyranny, to degrade and confuse all standards of humanity and morality. Hobsbawm is an outstanding example of the type.

Says Yousefzadeh himself, concerning something said by somebody called Paul J. Cella, who promptly thanks Yousefzadeh for the link!

Writing on Eagleton’s mash note to Hobsbawm and Marxism, Paul Cella says that Eagleton’s essay “shines with a palpable warmth.” No, it doesn’t. Rather, it misleads with a palpable malice; a malice shown to facts, to the intelligence of readers, to history, and to all of those who suffered at the hands of the Marxist cause.

This claim that Eagleton’s essay “shines with palpable warmth” is the one bit in Cella’s piece that Yousefzadeh disagrees with, and this bit by Yousefzadeh is the one bit in his piece that I disagree with.  Can an article not shine with a palpable warmth and mislead with a palpable malice?  Can warmth not be switched on, to mislead?  Surely yes.

Lucky I followed the link to the Cella piece, or I would have had him tagged as just another cretinous apologist for Marxism.  He is no such thing.

Says Cella:

There is no political cause comparable to Communism in at least this respect - it allows respectable men to endorse mass butchery, connive at sedition, falsify scholarship, and still live to be revered by the very sort of men and women who would surely perish, had that “radiant tomorrow actually been created.”

But the point surely is that there was no “radiant tomorrow”.  There was only a nightmare of terror and mass murder.  And there was no “very sort of men and women” who were particularly singled out by the nightmare for terror and death.  Everyone was in the firing line.  Seriously, Stalin used to instruct his murderers to murder people literally at random, just to make this very point, that nobody was safe.

Details.  What matters is that now we are arguing about the details of how evil Marxism was, and about the details of what exactly are the right words and phrases we should use when denouncing it and its evil apologists.  As Samizdata‘s Perry de Havilland would say, the metacontext has changed.

I particularly like this, from Instapundit:

Oh, my mistake. I thought, somehow, that Hobsbawm had died. Oh, well - all the more reason to speak ill of him now, then.

Indeed.

It’s is at English Russia, so I looked at it ...

… and assumed that it is just a rectangle of blocks put there for some idiot reason, which has gone a bit wrong, USSR style.  Some of the blocks have sunk a bit.  A few have been stolen.  But there it still sits, because nobody can be bothered either to fix it or to remove it.  Then, I got it.

I still prefer my Mac one, but that might not make such a cool sculpture.

English Russia is worth visiting, if not daily then at least fairly regularly.  My latest visit took me to this collection of Russian construction cock-ups.  However, my favourite of these pictures, on the right here, is not so much a cock-up as a case of, I would say, inspired improvisation, in the form of a new twist on the ball and chain method of demolition.  And since the object of the exercise is to knock something down rather than build anything, who can doubt that the story will end in this mission at least being entirely accomplished, with absolutely no snigger-worthy defects lingering on?  Epic fail? Surely not in this case.

Sorry about the temporary violence done by this posting to the one below.  I can only tell how these sorts of postings are looking by posting them.
 
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
 
 
 

A comment by James Waterton on this, deserves to be a blog posting in its own right:

A former colleague of mine was one of those exceedingly cerebral Russian science/maths boffins. He would teach maths in English for four months of the year to rich Chinese high school grads destined to study in the West. Then for the remaining 8 months of the year, he’d burn through the money he earned working on whatever mad scientist projects he could dream up. An extremely intelligent but also mild-mannered and courteous gentleman.

I had a number of chats with this man, and once sounded him out regarding his political views. He told me that his ideal political system was one where the more educated and intelligent you could prove yourself to be, the more votes you would receive in an election. Furthermore, access to public office would be made easier based on the same criteria. I remember finding this amusing. It seems obvious to me that out of all the countries that have been ill-served by extremely intelligent people (and there are many), Russia would have to have suffered the most under the yoke of the super smart who thought they were so intelligent that they had the right to tell those who they saw as less intelligent how to live.

The irony that this borderline genius still wasn’t smart enough to heed the abundantly clear lesson from his country’s past, and would, in his ‘perfect world’, introduce something similar, was not lost on me. Clearly people like this should be kept as far away from the levers of power as possible.

And now it is.

Incoming from Michael J:

Look around, ye mighty, and despair ...

Indeed.  Follow the link and gaze upon some truly excellent photos of world class USSR cranage and clutter, in a state of advance decay:

Not being a reader of Russian, I was only semi-sure what this stuff once was.  Pictures like this settled the matter:

Although that piece of decay seems to have been given a facelift.  It reminds me of how they make dead bodies look their best for funerals, but don’t actually fool anyone.

From English Russia:

One would think, how sweet of them, people of Saint-Petersburg fixed up several monuments commemorating their favorite pet… but it turned out to be that the cats themselves deserved that.

September 8, 1941, the city was besieged and the blockade lasted for 900 days. Soon enough there was no food in the city at all and the inhabitants began dying of hunger. During the terrible 1941-1942’s winter dwellers of the city ate everything they could and even pets were eaten (and that saved many peoples’ lives.) But if people are dying – rats begin to proliferate.

A few months later there were literally tens of thousands or even more rats prowling about the city and terrifying all the citizens. No weapon could do any harm to these monsters whether it was bombing or fire. The beasts ate even the smallest bits of food, all the provision remnants that were left in the city at the time. Moreover, because of rats the city was under the threat of epidemic diseases. And then the government put a fabulous idea through, they decided to gather cats all over Russia and send them to the city where they were right in place.

Altogether, during the blockade period more than 5000 cats from Omsk, Tyumen, Irkutsk and some other cities were sent to Leningrad and completed they job well – the city was cleared off.

Somewhat Russian English but a great story.

It reminds me of another concerning how they parachuted cats into ... Malaya, was it?  Also to deal with rats?  During the emergency?  Link, anyone?

Mixed metaphor alert!:

Climategate is a massive jigsaw puzzle which will take months to unravel.

And if you include “gate”, there are three different metaphors in there, not just the two obvious and colliding ones.  And, I’ve just realised that here (which is where I found out about Strata’s posting) is another mixed metaphor.  When did you last hear of a mole spilling beans?  See also: moles blowing whistles.  And ferrets ferretting out moles.  Rabbits yes.  But moles?  Maybe.  Ah, fun.  There’s a great comedy routine buried in among all this.

A. J. Strata’s posting is a speculation that the whistleblower might have been none other than starting line-up Hockey Teamer Keith Briffa.  As a commenter says:

The MSM is missing a hell of a story. If they want to sell papers just follow the leads and don’t worry about where it takes you.

Well, yes.  But that would mean doing journalism, like some pathetic sad loser A-list blogger.

That same commenter goes on to speculate about a Russian connection, which I find implausible.  So, it was shoved on a Russian server.  People all over the place are shoving stuff on servers all over the place.  That doesn’t mean that the KGB or their descendants are involved in this.  However, Russians have been stung by this accusation (see the end of this), and may in due course reveal who did shove the stuff up on one of their servers, so perhaps we should continue to accuse them of nefariosity in this, to get them to defend themselves by saying who really did it.

Another commenter:

These are the makings of a high intrigue science thriller novel or movie. ...

There will definitely be some very fun books coming out of this.  Then, watch for the movies and/or TV dramas.  If none then materialise, that will prove Hollywood bias, but I reckon Hollywood is biased in favour of money, more than in any other way.  Also, Hollywood likes intelligent movies about intelligent things, if only to keep their star actors amused and at ease with themselves, and thus willing to do their bit in the SF fantasy event movies for teenagers that make the real Hollywood money.  You know the ones I mean.  The ones with things like made-up global catastrophes.

Some Friday cats, photoed by David Farrer of Freedom and Whisky fame, in Sevastopol:

I especially like the snaps David recently took in Istambul, especially this one.  I do love this building, even if from some angles it looks like a Star Wars soldier.  Detail:

More DF holiday snaps, listed by place, easily accessible here.  Like the first commenter says, wonderful.

Swords into ploughshares, or in this case troop carrier into hotel:

I chanced upon this mighty beast - built by Russians, and refurbished by Americans - here.  My first thought: Photoshop, or maybe a plastic kit, or a combination of the two.  But it seems to be real.  That last link worked, but has now, as I now write this, stopped working.  No, hurrah, it’s back.

Don’t fancy this thing’s chances post credit crunch, do you?

Each soundproofed room is equipped with a queen-sized bed, fine linens, a mini-bar, coffee machine, wireless internet access, and all the luxurious appointments you’d expect from a flying five star hotel. Room service is available one hour after liftoff and prior to landing.

Although that makes it sound like an aerial brothel, so maybe it does have a future.

As for the actual error (see below) of leaving vital top secret information around the place, well, a thought does occur to me.  Perhaps MI6 have found that, as with all other press releases, theirs remain unread and binned by the journos, who hate MI6 on principle, or what passes for principle among the journos.  So, if MI6 want to spread some info around, true or false, the latest trick might be to leave it on a train or in a taxi.  That way the journos find out about it, and think they are hurting MI6 by studying it obsessively.  The typical recipient of such lost portable hardware seems to be the BBC.  So perhaps MI6 are mindfucking the BBC?

Or how about this?  Suppose there has been a spate of genuine cases of laptops being left in trains, with genuine information in them?  And there has, surely.  So how would you damage-limit that?  Answer: leave more laptops (or in this case cameras) on more trains (or in this case on e-Bay), but this time with bogus information that undermines or contradicts the first lot of information, perhaps suggesting that the original stuff was bogus, thereby discrediting the entire source.

The more I think about it, the more I can think of all manner of reasons for leaving laptops with “top secret” databases lying around, but where the databases have been altered in some way or another.

I know, never attribute to cunning what makes sense as cock-up.  But I’ve never bought this, or not as a universal rule.  It means believing that things are never done competently.  Which I think is just as ridiculous as assuming that they always are.  This is the blindness of the cynic, who cannot see smartness and competence even when it is right under his nose.

British intelligence services have a long and, er, honourable history of sneakiness and subterfuge, which has worked because people tend to assume that the British are idiots, incapable of being that cunning, and that competent.  I mean, we diddled Hitler into thinking that the Normandy landings were not the real thing, even while they were happening.  Later, just as a for instance, or so we are now told, we had the Russians copying a doctored version of Concorde, which consumed billions of resources they couldn’t spare and culminated in a deeply humiliating crash in Paris.  Who knows what other strokes we pulled as the Cold War drew to its - triumphant for us, may I remind you - end.  Why believe, suddenly, that such stuff is no longer happening now?

I’ve no idea whether Helen Szamuely is doing anything here except whistling in the wind, but I still like it.  The “gentleman in question”, I should explain, is speaking on behalf of the Russian government, and the two of them were arguing on the BBC Russian Service, along with a man from the Heritage Foundation:

Indeed, the gentleman in question remained very calm and full of certainty throughout the discussion, losing his temper only when I started enumerating the various ways in which the West can respond without any military intervention. “And who are you going to buy gas from,” he asked me angrily. “Lots of people,” replied I airily. “Who are you going to sell it to if we don’t buy it? There are no pipelines to China.” This did not make him very happy.

Helen reckons the Russians may have taken a bit more of a beating in Georgia than they are letting on.  These photos do seem to suggest that there has been quite a lot of head-to-head (as opposed to one army barging in and the other one just running away) fighting, by somebody against somebody.  But, what do I know?