The rest of my friend’s photos of Saturday’s Covid demo in London

Indeed. Here are the rest of those photos, this time all the horizontal ones:

I’m still trying to gather my thoughts about this demo, and the many others like it, and about demos generally. When do such demos work, and equally importantly, when don’t they work? In general, i feel there has to be some sort of echo going on indoors, where the power lies, before such outdoors stuff really makes much impact.

What demos do do, I think, is create friendship networks and spread ideas amongst those doing the demonstrating. That, I suspect, may be their most important impact in the longer run.

This demo did get a bit of mainstream media coverage, despite my friend’s prophecies of a black-out. But, I suspect that this was partly because, actually, it was not that big.

City Big Things photo

I love photos like this, looking up at the City of London’s Big Things, which I found above a piece of “partner content” at the FT:

Like I say, I like photoing upwards at the City of London’s Big Things.

So, although that “partner content” is very dreary, I do like the photo.

A way to think about photos is to arrange them along a spectrum, at one end of which is a photo that looks exactly as whatever it was looked like if you had been there yourself. But at the other end of the spectrum are photos which emphasise how differently the way the camera can sometimes see things to the way we humans do, and makes whatever it is look quite different to the way we’d mostly see it. Both sorts of photo are worth doing, one way or the other, depending on what you and trying to do with the photo. I’m just saying that they’re two distinct ways to do photos.

Because of all the reflections in the above photo (helped by the the fine weather), because of the untypical direction things are being looked at from (cameras (especially cameras with twiddly screens) don’t get cricks in their necks), and because of the difference between how humans see perspective and how cameras typically do this (this difference being why human artists actually had to discover perspective), this photo is much nearer to the looks-different-from-how-it-looks-to-us end of the spectrum.

Which is all part of why I like it.

Developing countries were able to leapfrog that bottleneck

Mixed metaphor alert!

HumanProgress.org as recycled by Jacob Tudor:

The landline phone never reached more than 21.4% of the world’s population

By adopting cellular technology, developing countries were able to leapfrog that economic bottleneck.

Could it be that HumanProgress.org mixed this particular metaphor on purpose, to draw attention to the very good news they were trying to publicise, by getting mixed metaphor spotters like me all excited about how they’d said it?

Good news is notoriously hard to spread, because it typically happens so gradually.

I got into a muddle with linking to the original HumanProgress.org tweet, which is why I linked instead to Jacob Tudor’s rehashing of it. The original is number 75 of a set of 78 tweets, and linking to that gets you to the entire set, instead of linking to this particular one, so that link would only get you to this particular one while it remains the latest one.

“It Charges 60 Times Faster Than Lithium-Ion …”

This sounds promising:

The graphene aluminum-ion battery cells from the Brisbane-based Graphene Manufacturing Group (GMG) are claimed to charge up to 60 times faster than the best lithium-ion cells and hold three time the energy of the best aluminum-based cells.

They are also safer, with no upper Ampere limit to cause spontaneous overheating, more sustainable and easier to recycle, thanks to their stable base materials. Testing also shows the coin-cell validation batteries also last three times longer than lithium-ion versions.

GMG plans to bring graphene aluminum-ion coin cells to market late this year or early next year, with automotive pouch cells planned to roll out in early 2024.

Based on breakthrough technology from the University of Queensland’s (UQ) Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology, the battery cells use nanotechnology to insert aluminum atoms inside tiny perforations in graphene planes.

Sounds good, doesn’t it? But good news, news about creative processes, only emerges gradually, as many – Matt Ridley to name just one – have pointed out. These batteries “are claimed” to speed up the charging process. And “automotive pouch cells” are merely “planned” to happen by a date that will hopefully be with us very soon. But things that are merely claimed or planned or just hoped-for do not necessarily happen, and certainly not always by the hoped-for date. So, if and when these batteries do end up happening, the fact that they have actually happened will be a distinct item of news. But, if and when it gets flagged up, this news item will not be that much of a revelation, because those who had already been following the story were seeing this end point of the process coming. Yeah yeah, better batteries. Cue the opinion pieces about how this is just technology as usual, with its inevitable carbon footprint, and which our children and grandchildren will mostly piss away by sending each other cat and dog videos or gibberish text messages on their dumbphones, blah blah blah.

Bad news, on the other hand, as often as not happens with one big explosion of horribleness. The badness of the news is not in doubt and everything happens all at once. A particular bit of the world goes, in one dramatic bang, from doing fine to Christ all bloody mighty what the hell was that? Hold the front page, and add opinion pieces saying that the entire world is going to hell.

Which is why, according to eyewitness accounts, the world has been going to hell ever since people got into the habit of recording such opinions. Nevertheless, opinions is all that these opinions have been. Luckily, it weren’t – and it ain’t – so.

Lots of people watch the FA Cup Final

Today I watched the FA Cup Final on television, in which Leicester City defeated Chelsea by the momentous margin of one-nil. The one was good, though.

But the reason I watched it was because it had a whiff of more than football about it, because there were, for the first time in ages at a football match, twenty thousand odd people actually in Wembley Stadium, watching it and of course shouting:

The victorious Leicester players there, in confusing brown, acknowledge the cheers of their fans, in confusing blue. Confusing, because the Chelsea players wore blue.

The commentators keep trying to persuade themselves that the FA Cup is what it was, when, for reasons to do with European qualification, it is not what it was. There used to be a European Cup Winners Cup, which you could only be in if you won your local Cup. Not any more. Now, you can be in the Consolation European League just by coming fifth or third or whatever in your local league. The FA Cup has accordingly lost its unique place in English life, and the commentators bang on more and more about its glorious past, which is a sure sign that its present is less glorious.

I seem to remember one year when Liverpool or Man U, or some such club ducked out of it, to play in some game in South America which they reckoned counted for more. “The Cup” was never the same after that.

Nevertheless, this one was a little bit special.

What I now feel able to say about Prince Philip

Nothing at all remarkable, just so you now know. Don’t read this posting for dazzling insights. It’s just that the last couple of days and the next few days are an example of a common thing, which is that everyone who is in the habit of expressing public opinions about this or that public thing feels obliged to hold back his or her regular opinions and instead to express an appropriately gracious and portentous opinion about whatever just happened.

For instance, BBC Radio Three, the classical music radio channel I listen to quite a lot, especially on Saturdays, was going to spend this Saturday concentrating on the life and works of Igor Stravinsky, no doubt emphasising what a fine composer the BBC thinks he was. But they scrapped this plan, and instead today merely played a succession of suitably profound and solemn classical selections, and also, I believe, a church service with lots of profound and solemn singing.

“Inappropriate” is typically now just a way of saying “wicked” without sounding like your great grandmother. But for once, this word is now, well, appropriate. Communicators suddenly fear saying anything “inappropriate”. Given that Prince Philip just died, will it make sense for us to be banging on about Stravinsky, or whatever it was were thinking of banging on about? Typically, it does not feel … appropriate.

Sporting events continue, because nothing can be allowed to interrupt that. But black armbands are liable to be worn and long silences endured by all present, during which all rebellious thoughts along the lines of “So bloody what?” are kept under heavy wraps of silence.

Above all, anyone who thinks that Prince Philip was, I don’t know, a horrid old racist, tends to keep quiet about that, for the duration of this strange public moment, or at least to be careful about who they say such things to. Or they do if they are wise, and if they do not want a storm of critical attention on social media, as some presumably do. We must not “speak ill of the dead”. Instead we say things like: “My thoughts are with his family”.

Which some of our thoughts probably are. I can’t be the only one now thinking that maybe the Queen will soon give up the ghost, having lost a husband she has been sharing her life with for so long, and by most public accounts very happily.

As it happens, the opinion I now find I want to express about Prince Philip, in carefully selected company, is a complaint although not that severe a complaint. I don’t think he was a racist; more like an equal opportunities tease, if only to get people to relax in his company and to stop trying to be so damn appropriate. But I definitely have one very particular and personal objection to this man, and by extension to his entire family. (It’s not a big enough objection for me to want them all denationalised, so to speak. As to that argument, I go along with the title of this posting at Quotulatiousness. If they got dumped, the likely alternative would be someone like John Berkow.)

But for now, in the event that you care what I think about Prince Philip and want to learn the particular way in which I objected to him, you will just have to wait.

For me to tell you today would be inappropriate.

Patrick and I talk about the current state of libertarianism

I’ve had a busy day doing other things, but last Tuesday, Patrick Crozier and I recorded a conversation about the current state of the libertarian movement, and I can at least today report that Patrick has now done the editing and introductory blogging and linkage, and you can listen to it by going here. It lasts, after Patrick had sliced out the pauses (which we discuss at the end), almost exactly an hour.

As the title of Patrick’s posting alludes to, we speak in particular about how libertarians happen to have been divided about recent Big Issues of the Day, like Brexit, Trump and Lockdown. In each of these arguments, libertarians have been on both sides. However, we both express guarded optimism that libertarians will be more united in the argument that will soon be raging about how best to recover from Lockdown. Our voice may not win, but it will at least be more like one voice.

For further clues about the kinds of things we discussed, see the categories list below. Notice that “Education” is not in this list. For some reason we failed to even mention this.

A list of Libertarian Alliance publications by Chris Tame

I’ve been reflecting on the career and achievements of Chris Tame:

Those being three more photos of Chris that I recently exhumed from my “filing system”.

Below is a list of the pieces of writing by him that were published (in some cases republished) by the Libertarian Alliance.

Political Notes 27
The Bankruptcy of the New Socialists
1987, 2pp.

Political Notes 40
On The Side of the Angels: A View of Private Policing
1989, 2pp.

Political Notes 41
Conservatives and the Closed Shop
1984, 4pp.

Political Notes 44
Taxation Is Theft
1989, 2pp.

Political Notes 148
The Case Against a Bill of Rights
1989, 7pp.

Philosophical Notes 1
The Moral Case For Private Enterprise

1985, 4pp.
Not available

Philosophical Notes 2
Is Freedom Selfish?: A Debate
(with Michael Ivens)
1985, 4pp.

Legal Notes 20
Why Sado-Masochism Should Not Be Criminalised (Evidence to the Law Commission on Consent and Offences Against the Person)
1994, 4pp.

Legal Notes 30
Freedom, Responsibility and Justice: The Criminology of the ‘New Right’
1998, 7pp.

Cultural Notes 1
Ernest Hemingway and the Failure of Nihilism
1983, 2pp.

Historical Notes 6
An Economic Misinterpretation of History: A Critique of J. K. Galbraith’s Account of American Capitalism
1989, 6pp.

Historical Notes 8
Power, Class and the State in Twentieth Century America
1989, 7pp.

Sociological Notes 1
Man, Concepts and Society
1987, 4pp.

Sociological Notes 2
Change and Pseudo-Change in Sociology
1986, 4pp.

Foreign Policy Perspectives 5
Hong Kong: Another British Betrayal
1988, 2pp.

Foreign Policy Perspectives 16
Hypocrisy in the ‘Peace’ Movement: A Case Study
1990, 2pp.

Libertarian Pamphlets 1
Against the New Mercantilism: The Relevance of Adam Smith
1979, 4pp.

Libertarian Pamphlets 2
Prostitution, The Free Market and Libertarianism
(Includes LA Evidence to the Criminal Law Revision Committee of the Home Office on Sexual Offences)
File currently unavailable

Libertarian Pamphlets 8
Environmentalism and Totalitarianism: An Obituary for Modern ‘Liberalism’
1987, 4pp.

Libertarian Pamphlets 9
The Politics of Whim: A Critique of the `Situationist’ Version of Marxism
1989, 4pp.

Libertarian Pamphlets 14
Libertarianism versus Conservatism: A Debate
(with Gerry Frost)
1989, 11pp.

Libertarian Reprints 1
Different Values: An Analysis of Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner, 1984, 6pp.

Libertarian Reprints 7
Sanitising Marx
1984, 2pp.

Libertarian Reprints 8
The Chicago School: Lessons From The Thirties For The Eighties

1984, 2pp.
File currently unavailable

Libertarian Reprints 9
Stirner in Context: The Profanization of Hegelianism and the Genesis of Marx’s Historical Materialism

1984, 2pp.
File currently unavailable

Libertarian Heritage 7
The Revolution of Reason: Peter Gay, The Enlightenment and the Ambiguities of Classical Liberalism
1992, 7pp.

Libertarian Heritage 12
Guy Aldred (1886-1963): The Socialist As Libertarian
1994, 2pp.

Libertarian Heritage 19
The Critical Liberalism of J. M. Robertson (1856-1933)
1998, 19pp.

This list didn’t take me long to contrive, but it did take longer than I thought it would. There were more than I had been expecting. They were mostly written and published towards the beginning of the LA publications surge that I presided over. I know for sure that Chris had plenty more that he wanted to write, but then his bone cancer got him.

Engine issue

Via Instapundit, this:

Police in Broomfield stated on Twitter that they received reports of dropped debris in several neighborhoods …

One of the engines on a passing United Airlines plane exploded. The plane flew back to Denver and landed safely. Nobody was hurt either by falling debris or in the plane.

CNN reported that there was an engine issue. I’ll say. A Boeing 777 apparently.

Lots more social media photos, including passenger videos of what remained of the engine, at the other end of the “this” link above. No way anyone could pretend this didn’t happen.

Quite a story. The Guardian agrees.

The hope of progress

Having recently received a life sentence of quite advanced lung cancer, I find myself noticing reports like this one entitled Ultra-precise lasers remove cancer cells without damaging nearby tissue. Cancer treatment is progressing fast, in all manner of directions, and I am now seeing stories of this sort every few days. Will it progress fast enough to prolong my life in a significant way? Knowing what I do of how long it takes for an innovation to go from a recent observation or discovery to a routine service, my guess now would be: not. But I can’t help hoping that it might.

In another context, I have described this sort of feeling as the torture of hope.

I came upon this above report at the Twitter feed of Steve Stewart-Williams. There being a lot more to that guy than cute animal videos.