Via TED talks (“Ideas worth spreading”), Yves Rossy talks about flying as only he can:
TED is well-worth keeping an eye on for “Riveting talks by remarkable people, free to the world”. TED began as a conference bringing together people from Technology, Entertainment and Design. Occasionally, a politician speaks at their events: here’s Rory Stewart calling for an end to the war in Afghanistan.
He has shown you, O mortal, what is good.
And what does the LORD require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
and to walk humbly with your God.
– Micah 6:8 via BibleGateway.com.
Some of these videos are in a US context, but the concepts apply to the UK and Europe. (We’ll just have to raise the funds to have such things done in the UK…)
On levels of debt:
On the madness of QE and the current economic consensus:
On the battle of economic ideas:
What worked for the republic of Georgia:
My presentation on honest money and the future of banking (follow the link for the slides):
I just finished Virginia Postrel’s challenging The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict over Creativity, Enterprise and Progress. It is an appeal to embrace the dynamism of life and overcome our fears for the future. It is about real progress, not state-driven, top-down control.
Consider for example this, from page 42:
Conserving only the underlying stable rules, while letting individual decision making drive change, is a concept that a century of technocracy has made foreign to most people. It does not fit neatly into the comfortable old left-right dichotomy and does not line up with technocratic assumptions about the powers and uses of government. It has a hard time making its case, because it promises only general patterns of improvement — spontaneous order and discovery — not specific results.
In the context of our present system of stifling technocratic control and horror of the future, it’s a fascinating read. In the context of having cared for the homeless this morning in Wycombe’s night shelter — something operated by local churches and volunteers, not the state — it raises a challenge: how shall we care for the disadvantaged in a world of spontaneous order and yet ensure we leave none behind?
The answer is as simple as it is difficult. Individuals must learn to enjoy their freedom responsibly, not choosing to make themselves slaves to others, but helping wherever they can.
Postrel is the editor of Reason magazine.
The KTM 950 Supermoto
Today, I rode to church on my KTM 950 Supermoto, which revealed a couple of top tips I would like to share. On the ride home, I assembled these into an illustration of the clear choice in British politics.
Here we go.
When in the rightmost of three lanes at a roundabout, indicating right, you should turn right. If, at the last moment, you decide to turn left into the services, go around the roundabout: do not cut across the two lanes on your left.
I am not sure whether the driver realised they had cut across me in the middle lane, but I was glad I had spotted their hesitation and was travelling with due caution. Motorcyclists: you are responsible for detecting imminent inattentive, irresponsible or unthinking behaviour in other motorists.
Over-regulating causes resentment. During coffee at church, I spotted a flyer for our “new style lunch”, prompting one of the gentlest and most charming ladies I have ever known to mutter darkly about the need to abolish the Health and Safety Executive, the Food Standards Agency and, indeed, the Government.
There is nothing sensible the Government could have done to prevent that driver turning left across me today. Banning bikes, banning cars or physically enforcing lane disciple are all either absurd, impractical or tyrannical. It was up to the driver to drive thoughtfully and responsibly and up to me to account for that person’s failure to do so.
As for the lunch, I don’t know what the details of the new food rules are, but I know they spoiled our back-to-school barbecue and that it has taken three months or so to reach the position that we can now hold a lunch, a lunch that is “new style” and which has driven gentle people to serious irritation. The details do not really matter: what is important is that government has made life a little worse, a little more difficult and a little more expensive for people who simply want to build up society, to help people have more to do with one another in genuine — that is, freely-chosen — community.
What a triumph!
So, now we find a Queen’s Speech which suffers the vapid futility of putting targets into law, a frankly Trotskyite attempt to declare the world a new place without any practical means to make it so. And while the LibDems pour scorn on writing targets into law, they remain committed to top-down managerial government funded by an outpouring from a supposedly inexhaustible horn of plenty.
But from David Cameron’s recent conference speech:
And here is the big argument in British politics today, put plainly and simply. Labour say that to solve the country’s problems, we need more government.
Don’t they see? It is more government that got us into this mess.
Why is our economy broken? Not just because Labour wrongly thought they’d abolished boom and bust. But because government got too big, spent too much and doubled the national debt.
Why is our society broken? Because government got too big, did too much and undermined responsibility.
Why are our politics broken? Because government got too big, promised too much and pretended it had all the answers.
Very often, people tell me they want nothing to do with politics, as if politics were simply a pointless argument about who gets to sit uselessly on the green benches of the House of Commons; it is not. It is, or should be, a serious conversation about how society should operate, about whether mums and dads and grandmothers and grandfathers should be able to cook a meal for other people to their own standards. It’s about whether ceaseless regulation can protect us from every harm, or whether we have to take responsibility for ourselves and one another, getting on with our lives in the knowledge that, sometimes, stuff happens.
Top-down government has reached the end of the road. We can’t afford it and it does not work. Moreover:
Do you know the worst thing about their big government? It’s not the cost, though that’s bad enough. It is the steady erosion of responsibility. Our task is to lead Britain in a completely different direction.
Quite right: it is time for change.
Via GTP Teachers | Transform your life, transform their futures, a strong initiative to place skilled graduates into teaching:
GTP Teachers specialise in placing accomplished professionals into Graduate Teacher Programme (GTP) placements with secondary schools in both the private and state sectors. We have nationwide coverage an a large candidate bank to choose from.
GTP Teachers provide high quality recruitment services to the UK education sector. We like to form a bond of trust built over time between school and candidate before a final comminment is made by both sides.
Today, Beth and I have been married only thirteen years.
I’m a lucky man 
Via Holidays 4 Heroes, the armed forces show how to deliver “quick reaction welfare”:
Holidays 4 Heroes is an informal group of people, including serving and retired personnel from all the UK Armed Forces and civilian supporters. We try to assist serving and former military personnel and their families, in a variety of ways that might otherwise fall outside the remit of the better-known Forces Charities. We work together through an Internet web-site used, mainly but certainly not exclusively, by Army personnel (The ARmy Rumour SErvice or “Arrse” for short – the military have a highly sophisticated sense of humour!).
It all started in December 2007, when users of the “Arrse” website and chat-room were made aware of a former serviceman in some financial difficulty and in imminent risk of being evicted from his home. In the simplest of terms, the folks had a whip-round and sorted the problem – within 48 hours the guy and his family were saved from eviction, Christmas groceries and presents for the children were provided, and everyone felt really good.
Jamie Whyte’s book “Bad Thoughts” is a tremendous guide for those who are seriously interested in the welfare of everyone in society, and who are not prepared to separate moral and intellectual seriousness.
Whyte’s 152-page book is entertaining and relevant and I do recommend it. In the meantime, I offer a brief and possibly inadequate guide to the key points here.
Today, I discovered and I am delighted to recommend Pitstop-Racing of Brize Norton.
This is a proper workshop, where you can not only get your suspension set expertly for your own style, you can meet the mechanic and have a conversation about camber, toe-in and understeer. This may not matter to you, but if you are a driver, it will.
The inside shoulders of my winter tyres were chamfered when they came off, suggesting too much toe-out or camber. It’s now set to the maximum toe-in within manufacturer’s limits and the whole is set to my preference. And all for £57.
I got the impression that this is an owner-managed business, which may go some way to explaining why I got exactly what I wanted at a reasonable price from a person obviously interested in engaging with his customer.
