Yesterday was an excellent day for me, photographically.  Usually, after an enjoyable and productive photo-walk, I show you people only a tiny sliver of what I took, and quite often not even that.  But today, Friday, I want to do a bit more than that, with a series of postings of various sorts of things I snapped.

Meanwhile, Friday being Friday, some sensational cat news, which I spotted in one of London’s free newspapers towards the end of the day:

Monopoly fans have voted to give the iron the boot and welcome in the cat as the new token for the much-loved board game.

I guess time was when the Iron was a huge deal in life, far more than mere pets.  Not any more.

I recommend googling “monopoly cat”.

A few months back I discovered that there were other Emmanuel Todd fans out there besides me, notably Lexington Green of Chicago Boyz, and James C. Bennett.  Emails were exchanged, and I met up with Bennett in London.  Very helpful.

Here is a big moment in what I hope may prove to be the long overdue rise and rise of Emmanuel Todd in the English speaking world.  Todd is quoted here by Lexington Green, and then linked to from here. Yes indeed, Instapundit.  Okay, this is because what Todd is quoted saying happens to chime in with what Instapundit wants to be saying, but … whatever.  That’s how Instalaunches work.

The Todd quote:

A double movement will assure the advancement of human history. The developing world is heading toward democracy — pushed by the movement toward full literacy that tends to create culturally more homogeneous societies. As for the industrialized world, it is being encroached on to varying degrees by a tendency toward oligarchy — a phenomenon that has emerged with the development of educational stratification that has divided societies into layers of “higher,” “lower,” and various kinds of “middle” classes.

However, we must not exaggerate the antidemocratic effects of this unegalitarian educational stratification. Developed countries, even if they become more oligarchical, remain literate countries and will have to deal with the contradictions and conflicts that could arise between a democratically leaning literate mass and university-driven stratification that favors oligarchical elites.

Says LG:

Todd’s book, despite its flaws, is full of good insights. This passage was prescient. The Tea Party (“a democratically leaning literate mass”) and it’s opponents, the “Ruling Class” described by Angelo Codevilla, ("oligarchical elites") are well-delineated by Todd, several years before other people were focused on this phenomenon.

This may cause a little flurry of Toddery in my part of the www.  Not all of it will be favourable, to put it mildly, because the book quoted is fiercely anti-American, and totally wrong-headed about economics.  Todd is one of those people who insists on dividing economic activity into “real” and “unreal” categories, solid and speculative, honest and delusional.  Todd’s problem is that he imagines that the making of things that hurt your foot when you drop them is inherently less risky than, say, operating as a financial advisor or a hedge fund manager.  But both are risky.  It is possible to make too many things.  Similar illusions were entertained in the past about how agriculture was real, while mere thing-making was unreal.

Todd believes that the US economy is being “hollowed out”, with delusional activity crowding out “real” activity.

The problem is that Todd is not completely wrong.  Economic dodginess was indeed stalking the USA in 2002.  But the explanation for the processes that actually did occur and are occurring, which are easily confused with what Todd said back in 2002 was happening, and which will hence make him all the more certain that his wrongness is right, is not that manufacturing is real and financial services unreal, but that for Austrian economics reasons (Todd appears to have no idea whatever about Austrian economics), all dodgy and speculative activities, most emphatically including dodgy manufacturing ventures, have been encouraged by bad financial policies.  Todd also seems to imagine that only the USA has been guilty of such follies.  If only.

Such are some of the flaws in this book that LG refers to.

But none of that impinges on Todd’s fundamental achievements as a social scientist, which I have long thought ought to resonate in my part of the www.  This should help.

My problem (one of my problems) is that I accumulate open windows, to things I don’t want to forget about, and which I am hence reluctant to shut.  But these open windows, and all the advertising shite they come with, clog up my computer, or so it feels to me.

Now I am sure there is a better answer to this problem than the one that follows, but for now, my answer, today, is to stick a few such links here, where they won’t vanish in half a day and where anyway I know my way around.

The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet.  Note, incidentally, the disastrous headline punctuation. Punctuation in headlines says you can’t have a full stop at the end of a headline, but that you can have whatever punctuation you like in the middle of the headline, fullstops included.  Bizarre.  (Not that that’s why the piece interests me.)

That Codevilla piece about the American ruling class.  Actually I think a major part of this story is that it isn’t only the American ruling class.  It’s a global, or at least beyond national, class.  The entire West that was is starting to be ruled by a united gang of interconnected people.  Rulers of The World Unite.  You have nothing to lose but the love of your dreary little voters.  (To “love”, should I add “consent”?)

On the Validity and Necessity of Atheist Criticism of Islam.  I like Edmund Standing a lot.  Mostly I agree with this.  But, I think he makes too little of the differences between Christianity and Islam.  Christianity is bonkers but Islam is downright evil.  (Although, I do admit that Christian anti-semitism is deeply embedded in it.) The problem I have with Islam is not only that it is so false.  It is that it so nasty.  Allah does not exist, but if Allah does exist he should be opposed.  This is somewhat less true of the various Christian versions of God, especially nowadays.

The Vanity Fair Sarah Palin piece.  I want to read this to see if it actually says anything more than: she’s a politician!  Is she going to run for President?  If she gets to be President will she be a quite good one, as Reagan (won the Cold War - only talked about stopping the US state spending rise) was.  Will President Palin, that is to say, actually stop the US state spending rise?

The Chinese state media global offensive.  Were a time traveller from a hundred years hence to invite me to guess what sparked the Big War of 2037, I’d guess China versus someone, rather than Islam versus anyone.  Islam has the will to Big War, but looks unlikely at all soon to command the means to wage it.  (I include Iran in that judgement.  There is more to having a Bomb than just having a Bomb.  You must also have the means to attack the other guy’s Bomb, and to defend your remaining Bombs, which you must also have.) And I have long believed that being able to fight wars is more important in their causation than merely wanting to.  I mean, few great powers unambiguously want to fight major wars, because they have too much to lose.  But, from time to time, they still did, and might one day again.  Hopefully The Bomb will continue to work its terrifying magic, and Great Wars Between Great Powers will continue to not happen, but how long will that last?

I want to do a Big Piece on Samizdata about all that, Real Soon Now.  Globalisation as we now know it, i.e. the version where we don’t fight global wars against one another, is more caused by The Bomb (which first happened in 1945) than by Modern Electronic Communications (which first happened in 1842).  See Global Ruling Class, uniting of, above.

That should clear out my computer’s tubes a little.

I’ll only say it quietly, that is to say here, but I think this earlier posting of mine is looking rather good today, what with the Devil’s Kitchen that was having now decided to stop swear-blogging.

The thing is, Chris Mounsey aka DK can be a swear-blogger, or he can be the leader of a political party, but not both.  Shame it took a bollocking from the mainstream media to make this clear to him, but he has now made his choice.

On the other hand, the still swear-blogging Obnoxio, who actually saw Mounsey’s telly performance, which I have yet to do, said he thought it wasn’t a bollocking, and that he did very well:

Chris did very well.  He is, I fear, a natural media whore.

Let’s hope so.

Last Friday, i.e. on April 9th, I recorded a conversation with Tim Evans, friend of many years, libertarian (in fact President of the Libertarian Alliance) and free market think tanker of growing renown, about what David Cameron has been up to and what he thinks he is doing.  It lasts a little over half an hour.

I introduced Tim’s words-to-be as in being opposition to those who say that Cameron is a waste of space and heading for disaster, of one kind or another, electoral or Prime Ministerial.  He is a lightweight in a world that has become heavyweight.  He is the answer to a question that is not being asked any more.  That kind of thing.  But actually, although what Tim said was a most convincing explanation of what Cameron reckons he is doing, it was not any sort of proof that the critics of Cameron are necessarily wrong about him, as I somewhat found myself arguing.  Britain’s voters seem to be rather unimpressed by Cameron just now.  Tim’s picture of what Cameron is doing is very convincing as a description of his state of mind and party political tactics, but that doesn’t necessarily make Cameron’s state of mind either admirable or guaranteed to result in electoral success.

Yes, Cameron’s various Conservative predecessors did not get what they were up against.  But Cameron’s strategy (if what now follows is indeed what it is) of waiting until the last possible moment before offering alternative policies to Labour policies, having spent years giving Labour’s - and particularly Brown’s - statist inclinations a deliberate free ride, to sucker them and him into being more statist, struck me on Friday and strikes me now not only as morally dubious, but also, because so morally dubious, also electorally hazardous.  What if the voters decide that Cameron is not the nation’s solution, but a mere aspect of the nation’s problem?  At one point, Tim said that Cameron will now be reckoning that his current nine point lead in the polls is evidence that he is on the right track.  I blurted out at that point that he should be thirty points ahead.

However, the last thing I want to do is suggest that the conversation was other than extremely interesting.  It certainly interested me.  The central point is that Tim was concerning himself with how Cameron thinks, with how things are.  Not with how he or I might like them to be.

What Tim says may also illuminate the rest of the campaign. Tim says that Cameron has just executed a major tactical switch.  When in mere opposition, Cameron refused to propose good alternative policies for our disastrous government, because the government would have stolen them.  But now, in the heat of the campaign, such policy theft won’t work so well.  Too undignified, too fresh in voter memory, making too much of a nonsense of the Labour manifesto of only a few days before.  So, Cameron is now, finally, proposing a few anti tax and spend policies, and if Tim is right, can be expected to propose quite a few more in the days and weeks to come.  We shall see.

I was not feeling a hundred per cent last Friday, so my performance in particular needed quite a bit of editing, hence the delay in posting this (what with me still not feeling a hundred per cent between then and now), but it should all sound okay now.

I just attached this rather eloquent comment to a Johnathan Pearce Samizdata posting about how he might emigrate out of here if Brown won the next election, Heaven help us:

I think JP is doing us a favour by talking about leaving, and would be doing us another favour if he did leave, if things got that bad.

No number tells politicians more clearly that they have to shape up and stop wrecking the place better than the number of people just buggering off. People leaving is the one number that tends to signify that things are about to get better, because it just can’t be ignored or spun. The number can be lied about, of course, but big queues to get out are hard to pass off as anything else.

It happened like this at the end of the 70s when all those movie stars upped sticks. They did us a favour too. They don’t call this “voting with your feet” for nothing.

Voice and exit.

Unless of course the Brown government builds a Berlin Wall around the country. But that would be pretty hard to miss also, if it worked. The more you have to sacrifice and risk to get out, the more dramatic it all looks, and the more obvious is the damage done by the lying bastards who did it.

And that’s the central problem now, making it clear how much damage is being done. That’s what the Brown gang are now all busy trying to conceal.

JP’s posting helps with this.

I wanted to have a diary entry, so to speak, about how I felt just now about it all.  Comments at Samizdata are hard to get back to.  Postings here are easier to get back to.

Other eloquent comments are rapidly accumulating.

Wait two months for a Brian Micklethwait Dot Com recorded conversation, and then two come along on the same day, although actually these two were recorded over a month apart.

This one with Antoine, recorded on Tuesday of this week, describes the electoral earthquake that was the victory of Republican Scott Brown over Democrat Martha Coakley in the “special election” they had there, and how the Republicans have now caught up with the Democrats when it comes to applying blogging, Twitter, Facebook, etc., to the winning of such elections.

How does this affect US politics in the months and years to come?  And what can we in Britain, in particular we libertarians, learn from all this?

We managed to keep it down to below half an hour this time.  Enjoy.

More from Antoine on this election here, and generally here.

Plus more recorded talk on related topics from Antoine to these guys.  Click on this for the talk itself.  More thoughts from Antoine just before he gave that talk here.

Yesterday I did a bit on Samizdata about a BBC TV discussion show about Barack Obama.  They get that Obama is now unpopular, but have no convincing idea about why.  Racism and irrational fury, is all they can think of.  Biased BBC linked to it.  Which was nice.

Further to that, this, from the latest Radio Times, advertising a Radio 4 programme going out this evening called entitled “Turkeys Voting For Christmas”:

Why is it that people so often vote against their own interests?  David Runciman looks at the unpopularity of President Obama’s healthcare reforms and asks why so many Americans seem angry about efforts to make them better off.

Because you see, Runciman just knows better than all those Americans what their own interests are.  And Obama’s “reforms” could not possibly, even possibly, be a bad idea.

I am also pondering a posting about how hard it will be for the BBC to dig itself out of its bias problem, in the event that it ever decides that it wants to.