davidthompson

Bargepoles and Such

As I get my news mainly from the Guardian and the BBC, it had entirely passed me by.

Ian Jack, Guardian columnist, reveals a little more than he intends.

Mr Jack is referring to this story about the Miliband brothers, their tax arrangements and property portfolios. 

The Guardian was probably right to ignore a story that charged Miliband with greed and hypocrisy.

Given the track record of the Guardian’s own editor and many of its contributors, hypocrisy is indeed a subject best avoided.

Friday Ephemera

Instant underpants. // The chess set / sex toy combo. // The Kopp-Etchells effect. // Watches made of wood. // How ink is made. // Monkeys ride capybara. (h/t, Coudal) // It’s pasta, it’s a whistle. // Where lighthouses are. (h/t, MeFi) // Ah, at last. Now rock music makes sense. // The Twins Who Share a Body. // Telescopic eye implant. // Abseiling and lava, together at last. // A handsome motorcycle. // 50 years of Japanese concept cars. // Bunnies in cups. // Cement earrings. // Nutcrackers (circa 1950). // Attention male students. You will undergo a “cognitive and emotional intervention,” whether you want to or not.

Deterrent

  

A West German government bunker, a Dutch atomic bomb shelter and an abandoned Ukrainian submarine base. Click to enlarge.

From Relics of the Cold War by Martin Roemers.

Wounds Sustained, Oblivion Avoided

By the mid-1970s, Britain was widely regarded - choose your favourite cliché - as the Sick Man of Europe, an economic basket case, ungovernable... In [1978] the year before Thatcher came to power, Britain, upon whose empire the sun never set, endured the Winter of Discontent. Labour unrest shut down public services, paralysing the nation for months on end… Rubbish was piled high on the streets of Britain that winter, and so, at one point, were human corpses. The Soviet trade minister told his British counterpart, “We don’t want to increase our trade with you. Your goods are unreliable, you’re always on strike, you never deliver.” This was what had become of the world’s greatest trading power.

From Claire Berlinski’s “There Is No Alternative”: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters, which I’m halfway through reading and enjoying quite a lot. It’s a brisk and witty reminder of what was at stake and how socialism can lead to extraordinary selfishness. It also has plenty of revealing incidental nuggets, as when Berlinski notes the feelings of some of Thatcher’s loftier enemies:

When asked why intellectuals loathed her so, the theatre producer Jonathan Miller replied that it was “self-evident” – they were nauseated by her “odious suburban gentility.” The philosopher Mary Warnock deplored Thatcher’s “neat, well-groomed clothes and hair, packaged together in a way that’s not exactly vulgar, just low,” embodying “the worst of the lower-middle class.” This filled Warnock with “a kind of rage.”

Claire Berlinksi is interviewed by National Review’s Peter Robinson, again in 5 parts:

1. Socialist winter.

2. How she did it.

3. Thatcher and Obama.

4. Turkey and Islam.

5. What’s a radical?

Glenn Reynolds also interviews Berlinksi here. (Registration required.)

Related: Tory! Tory! Tory! An excellent 2006 miniseries tracing the history and context of Thatcherism, the miseries it involved and the much greater miseries it avoided. Well worth viewing in full. The three episodes are embedded below in six parts: 

Friday Ephemera

The emergency bra. A bra for emergencies. // How memory cards are tested. // Python digesting rat (interior view). // Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. // There’s a vortex on Venus. // Victorian submarines. // Bollywood + robots. // Puny human musicians, make way for GuitarBot. // Diamond-studded hoods, custom made for your falcon. // And girls should have costumes too. // The Foyn Johanson house. // Private jet interiors. // Chocolate artisans. // Maintaining high standards in Italian sculpture. // Logan’s Run in Lego. // “Yes, we call it the death ray.” (h/t, Stephen Keating) // And a little project for the family: Space Balloon.