Awesome Neil Clark

7:53am

Readers of my old blog will recall that I had a mild obsession with a blogger called Neil Clark, whose site is a form of 'car crash blogging': bizarre and entirely spurious assertions mixed with propaganda in favour of mass murderers. I look at his blog from behind my metaphorical sofa, dreading what weirdness I will see but nonetheless compelled to stare. 

His take on the Iranian nuclear situation is typical. Iran should acquire nuclear weapons:

The President of Iran has of course denied that his country has any plans to build a nuclear bomb and that his only interest is to develop nuclear energy. In the interests of peace, I do hope he's lying.

Although I have so far successfully resisted here at my new home the urge to link to any of his entries, I have cracked. There is something unsavoury, I realise, in mocking the afflicted, but I have to confess that I simply can't  resist.

Before I point you to his latest fantastic post, some context is in order. Clark's hero is Slobodan Milosevic. The historian Marko Attila Hoare has described Clark thus:

Clark has no qualifications in journalism or in Balkan or Middle Eastern studies, knows none of the Middle Eastern or Balkan languages, has never reported from either region, has little first-hand knowledge of either, and has never conducted original research or published a book or scholarly article on either. He apparently visited Belgrade in the 1990s and mistook the splendid former imperial metropolis for an example of the achievements of a socialist planned economy.

Even by his own standards, however, Clark excelled himself yesterday. He appears to believe that Jimmy Carter won the 1980 US presidential election and defeated Ronald Reagan. In a post entitled Time for a Constitutional Amendment, Clark asserts:

If only Jimmy Carter would be allowed to stand for President for a third time! He's head and shoulders above everyone else in American politics.

Eh? There is a bar on any President serving more than two terms. To believe that Carter is barred from standing for the presidency, one must believe that he served two terms.

How can one not be drawn to the geopolitical observations on of such a fellow?

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What a waste of time and money

8:23am

I have a piece in The Business on ten years of Labour's management of the NHS, which you can read here (it's also in the Spectator's Blair supplement):

New Labour had its limits, even in 1997. Those limits were made flesh by the appointment of Frank Dobson as Tony Blair’s first health secretary. For all the changes which the NHS has seen since then, there has been an underlying Old Labour consistency to the government’s approach to the NHS over the past decade: spend as much money as possible, fiddle with the management structures, and all will be well with the wonderful NHS. But if that was the answer, then one  has to wonder what on earth was the question. Tony Blair’s legacy, after a decade in charge of the NHS, is a false dawn on reform and waste on an unprecedented scale.

...The notion has somehow taken hold that a radical Tony Blair was, as in education and welfare, prevented by his Chancellor from making the necessary bold reforms to healthcare provision. But it was not Gordon Brown who, in January 2001, sat on Sir David Frost’s BBC1 sofa and announced that NHS spending would rise to the EU average. It was Mr Blair. In reality, the Prime Minister was the prime mover behind the idea that money was the real problem, and bounced a horrified Chancellor into a spending commitment for which the word ‘profligate’ does not even come close. Between 1999/2000 and 2007/08, spending on the NHS will have almost doubled in real terms. In 1999/2000 spending was £46.2 billion; in 2004/05 it was £71.4 billion. But the result, far from curing the NHS’s ills, has been paltry. So where did the money go? In its 2005 review of the UK, the OECD found that, although the NHS budget increased by half between 1999 and 2004, the number of doctors increased by only a quarter. And Department of Health statistics show that although there has been an increase in the number of operations, it is much slower than the increase in the number of doctors or of spending. Productivity, in other words, has fallen. So it should come as no surprise to discover that 56 per cent of the £5.5 billion extra spending that went into the NHS in 2005 last year went on pay.

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Litter degeneracy

10:07am

This piece by Jeff Randall on litter louts and other things which fire his ire is terrific:

The list was long: badly behaved children on aircraft, yobs of any sort, idiots who borrow £1.3 million on a pack of credit cards and then blame lenders for being "irresponsible", cold calls from investment charlatans, companies that have answering machines instead of receptionists, the M25, the London Underground, human rights lawyers who prevent terrorists from being deported, social security cheats and guardians of political correctness.

It was a crescendo of complaint that reached a climax when, finally, I blurted out my pet hate... "litter". Yes, litter.

Now, before you start reminding me that in a world of nuclear weapons, starving children and melting icecaps, there are many worse things to worry about than litter, I agree - but only in theory.

In practice, almost nothing infuriates me more than the dumping of rubbish in public places by selfish litter thugs. Their fouling of our streets, parks and countryside reflects a strain of moral degeneracy that blights a civilised society. It's the disposability of responsibility.

In an overweening welfare state that teaches us to expect someone else to pick up the tab, it's hardly surprising that many expect someone else to pick up the litter. We have created an underclass of takers, not necessarily defined by income (or the lack of it). They know their rights, but have no sense of obligation.

As Jeremy Paxman, the broadcaster, correctly points out, mountains of litter tell us much about the nation we have become. "People, like animals, do not generally foul their own nests. But they feel free to throw rubbish around for much the same reason that morons feel free to vandalise bus shelters - they do not feel the public realm is theirs."

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Empty

9:39am

Here's the definitive judgement on the Chirac years from Jacques Marseille, Professor of Economic History at Sorbonne University:

He has enabled us to deal in history books with the 1995-2007 period very quickly: there will be nothing to say.

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This horse will win the Derby, surely?

9:34am

OK, this isn't a tipping site. But...

I was out all yesterday and only caught up with the Dante result late last night. Authorized, the ante post Derby favourite, made his comeback. And what a performance! I can't remember being so taken by a Derby trial in years. Not, in fact, since the ill-fated Shergar won the Chester Vase.

Authorized's price has come in - as it would do after such a scintillating win. But at 6/4 - a 50% return on investment - that is some price for what I think must be as near a certainty as one can have in a race like the Derby.

(I've doubled him up with Passage of Time in the Oaks at 5/2, whose Musidora win was also impressive, I thought.)

 UPDATE I am corrected by a commenter:

You must do things differently in the UK. If I bet $10 a horse at 6/4 in Australia, I would get $25 - including my $10 stake - if the horse won. Thats 150% on investment.

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Stuck with Ming

12:40pm

A very good line from Mary Ann Sieghart on why the LibDem party is stuck with Sir Menzies Campbell:

It can’t get rid of one leader for being too drunk and the next for being too sober.

 

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The most unfortunate person in Britain

8:48am

From the BBC:

Beverley Silke, of the Stroke Association said: "Someone in the UK has a stroke every five minutes."

Who is he or she? How does he or she cope? 

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Food as art, or pie in the sky?

7:49am

I have a piece in the Times, here, about the Spanish chef, Ferran Adrià, being invited to 'exhibit'  at the five-yearly Documenta art show in Kassel, Germany. Here's an extract:

The invitation has, predictably, caused uproar in the art world. José de la Sota, art critic of El PaÍs, put it this way: “Adrià is not Picasso. Picasso did not know how to cook but he was better than Adrià [at art]. What is art now? Is it something or nothing?”

He might indeed ask: many of us have been wondering for quite a while, when we see elephant dung, protest banners and piles of bricks winning art prizes. Clement Greenberg, the most influential critic of modern art, defined it as “the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticise the discipline itself”. That seems to me as good a definition of Adrià’s style of food as any I have read.

...Adrià reacts to the criticism from the Spanish art establishment thus: “True, I am no Picasso, but what is art in times like these? Many people act as if I should apologise for participating. I am not going to. I understand there might be people who are annoyed. It’s tough to see a cook get invited to this. But what is art? If they want to call what I do art, fine. If not, that’s fine too.”

Spot on. In an art world where anything seems to go, I can’t for the life of me see why Ferran Adrià’s food, which fulfils every criterion of modern art, should not take its place alongside the likes of Tracey Emin.

Come to think of it, shouldn’t it be the woman whose contribution to art is an unmade bed whose place in the exhibition should be in question? Why is that art, but Adrià’s not? The food at El Bulli is certainly a lot more elevating to look at.

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My take on the grammar schools fiasco

7:37am

You can read my take on David Willetts' grammar school speech here, in today's Daily Mail. (By the way, someone has inserted a nonsensical reference to assisted places in the piece - please ignore it as assisted places were, of course, nothing to with grammar schools.)  

Here's the gist of my piece:

Mr Willetts has all sorts of nuanced explanations for his dumping of grammar schools. He says that there are too many middle class pupils in grammar schools and not enough pupils from poor backgrounds - basing this assertion on the fact that fewer pupils qualify for free school meals in grammars than in an average state school. 

Yet if you look instead at the best-performing 200 comprehensives, just 5.3 per cent of pupils get free meals, compared with the national average of 14.3 per cent.

So, using Mr Willetts' warped logic, should the Tories therefore associate themselves only with sink comprehensives? Clearly, his argument is a nonsense.

 ...A poll last year found that 70 per cent of parents would like to see more grammar schools established. But forget what ordinary people want. The Conservative leader's every action is based on gaining the acceptance of the chattering classes - the Islington dinner party set who run the BBC and the Left-liberal media who despise grammar schools. 

Not that we should be surprised to see a Conservative betray the country on education. The party's record has been shameful for decades. It was a Conservative education minister, Sir Edward Boyle, who began the dismantling of grammar schools in the 1950s.

Have a guess under which Education Secretary more grammar schools closed than any other? Tony Crosland or Shirley Williams? No. The answer is Margaret Thatcher, who did not lift a finger to stop a single grammar school from closing in Edward Heath's 1970-1974 government.

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What's Opera, Doc?

4:16pm

Tim Worstall, thank you. THANK YOU! I saw this, the greatest cartoon ever, when I was a kid, and have never seen it since. It is even better and cleverer than I remembered. It is sheer bloody genius.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd in Wagner's What's Opera, Doc?

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