Bob's blog - the realm of threalm

This observation has been variously attributed to Aristotle, Churchill and CS Lewis.  They all seem to have known a thing or two that's stood time's test, and this seems like one of those.

If you are brave, watch this You Tube  clip . The approach to climate change advocated in this clip is sure to ruffle more than a few feathers. To dismiss this bloke's point of view simply because you don't like him, his party or where he comes from, or because considering such an approach might diminish the certainty of your current political aspirations and world view, is to not take seriously the importance and difficulty of the global climate problem. We have recently had a wake up call seeing the energy problems that Germany is now confronted with after Russia's invasion of the Ukraine,  because of its self inflicted energy dependence on Russia.  It seems that by not properly considering that its increased vulnerability, created by its over reliance on renewables causing a necessity for dependence on Russian gas for warmth and power, Germany has exposed its people to unnecessary and preventable discomfort and even real peril. This   is a lesson that the rest of ...

.... old truths remain unchanged: The free world isn’t free because it is rich — it is rich because it is free . Freedom is not only a moral good but also a practical one: Because we have a system that enables us to fail quickly and fail cheaply , we can try many different approaches to social and material problems, throwing everything we have at them and seeing what works. Authoritarian societies, in contrast, have trouble adapting to fluid conditions, often discomfited by problems that cannot be solved with bayonets. One by one, Americans and Germans and Englishmen aren’t any more intelligent than Russians or Chinese or Saudis, but the institutions of free societies — from the free press to competitive elections — enable free people to rally and deploy their collective intelligence in a way that is difficult or impossible in unfree societies.     From National Review article " Autocracy's Fatal Flaws " 20 March 2022. Hat tip to Jonathan Pearce, Samizdata quote of the ...

“ I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. ” (Ecclesiastes 9:11, King James Version) Ain't that the truth. So we should all be thankful for those small mercies that are bestowed on us, even if we may not rightly know to whom or to what we might owe such thanks.  Reciprocally, it also seems churlish to begrudge those who are swift, strong, wise, rich or favoured, simply because we know that mere time and chance have contributed to these gifts.  All of us might be swift, strong, wise, rich or favoured, with application and luck.  We may just have to chance our arm a few times at achieving these elusive goals in the casino of life.  Kinda truthy...

"Not the Bee"  published a piece on 8 December about Amazon's cloud computing division having an outage earlier this week, leaving thousands of people with faulty fridges, front doors and thermostats etc.  Amazon's  Internet of Things "smart homes" stuff, designed to make the little things easier and life more convenient, went down. This made some small smart things quite big, dumb and less convenient. Being locked out of your home, shivering with cold at home or having spoilt food in the fridge, can cause you problems.  And that's just the easy to identify domestic stuff. Whole energy grids, traffic light networks, defence systems or hospitals could easily be included in such a list in only a slightly different scenario. There's a signal here, amidst the noise, if you're looking for it.

We do seem to be living in "interesting times"  (or is this just an expression of my personal "contemporary historical significance bias"?). Our civilization seems to be in the midst of a nervous breakdown in the early 21st century, what with 9/11, the IPCC, GHG emissions, LGBT IQ , BLM, CRT, Brexit,  Trump, COVID19, Biden, Xi, Putin, J6, and the Insidious Acronym Plague (IAP).  Amongst other crazy ideas, personal identity has now become a big deal in our public domain. The former aspirational liberal ideal of racial, gender, ethic, disability and religious blindness as the way to live and interact in a fair and proper non-prejudiced way, has now been inverted by the prevalence of the confounding and contradictory idea that unless you demonstrably display preference and sympathy for certain specific, but seemingly ever changing, categories of people and opinions, you are evil, wrong and undeserving of an audience.  For many centuries there has been a confusing Engli...

The Samizdata quote of the day on 1 December 2021 from Perry de Havillland is from a website I have not encountered before: Eugyppius . Here's the quote:      People tend to believe things that further their personal interests, and universities are no exception. Wokification succeeded largely because it gave a lot of different people a lot of different things that they wanted. It gave the increasingly powerful university administration a reason to hire more administrators to manage diversity and ensure its forward march. Self-propagation is the highest goal of administrators everywhere. Wokeness also became a useful tool in ongoing turf wars between administrators and faculty. Diversity is a simple metric via which the administration can interfere with faculty hiring and academic operations; new diversity hires know who is buttering their bread and remain loyal to the administrators whose policies brought them in. For the increasingly mediocre and incapable faculty who n...