Published on 17 May 2017
There is no truly good way to measure unemployment, which makes it pretty easy for successive administrations to claim that unemployment is consistently improving. But when we do our level best to include all of the unemployed in the numbers, what we learn is that unemployment levels now are higher than they were at the beginning of the Great Recession. That’s the bad news. The good news is that things actually have been getting better over time. In this week’s episode, James and Antony take a look at the actual unemployment numbers to get to the bottom of what they really mean.
Get the facts here:
https://fee.org/articles/you-cant-trust-unemployment-statistics/
May 18, 2017
You Can’t Trust Employment Statistics
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World of Warships – HMS Hood
Published on 17 May 2017
Look up in the sky! Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No don’t be silly, it’s HMS Hood. Bugger off with your Superman jokes, Jingles.
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If you subsidize art, you’ll get more [bad] art
I missed this when it got posted initially … Theodore Dalrymple on an Irish government initiative to actually audit the art they’re busy subsidizing:
Like most governments these days, the Irish government is a patron of the arts. The problem is that most governments know as much about the arts as I know about how to select camels for a camel race.
Naturally, therefore, governments rely on advisers to advise them on artistic matters, in effect delegating to them the disbursement of funds. Here the problem is that the art world is now so corrupt morally, intellectually, and aesthetically that the advice it gives is more likely to resemble Mr. Madoff’s advice to investors than Lord Duveen’s to Henry Clay Frick. There has always been bad art, of course, but rarely has it been so heavily subsidized; and when we see work of which we are inclined to ask, “But is it art?” we should perhaps be asking instead, “Is it government-funded?”
The Irish Arts Council, however, recently came up with a novel, even transgressive idea (“transgressive” is the highest term of praise in current art criticism, incidentally), namely that the artists they subsidize should show some sign of artistic endeavor. It is true that the council’s choice of word, audit, was an unfortunate one, as if artists were accountants having their accuracy checked; and the eminent Irish writer Colm Toibin said that the council’s terminology — for example, “working artists engaged in productive practice” — had a North Korean ring about it; an exaggeration, no doubt, given that the North Korean regime subjects its artists to something more severe than mere audit, but one knows what he means. These days it is increasingly difficult to distinguish, stylistically, between an official circular and a page from The Selected Works of Kim Il-sung. (The only one of those communist leaders worth reading, by the way, is Enver Hoxha, who had a wonderful natural gift for poisonous invective and insult. As by the end of his life he had fallen out with everyone, he also had a lot of practice at it; his principle was never to speak well of the dead, especially if he had killed them himself.)
But Mr. Toibin was exercised about the very idea of demanding of artists that they actually produce something in return for the money they receive. After all, many a great artist in the past has had a fallow patch in his life, sometimes lasting decades; you can’t just go to an artist and insist that he be inspired, any more than a photographer can insist that his subjects be natural in front of the lens. His logic appears to be:
Great artists a and b had fallow patches
Artist c is having a shallow patch
Therefore artist c is great and indefinitely worth subsidy
Now, I’m not against patronage as such; sometimes I even wish I had had a patron who had relieved me of the necessity to earn my daily bread (and jam). Then, surely, I would have written an imperishable masterpiece; I would have had time for le mot juste instead of having to make do with the le mot approximatif that mere journalism, as against literature, requires. But the government doesn’t have the taste or discrimination to act as patron. It can’t even choose its advisers well.
The Avengers On Location (1966)
Published on 13 Apr 2014
Beaulieu, Hampshire.
At Lord Montagu’s Motor Museum we see the filming of the ‘tag’ pieces for episodes of The Avengers television series, where Diana Rigg and Patrick Macnee drive off in a vintage car – a different one each time.
Several shots of the cast and crew in the grounds of Beaulieu; Patrick Macnee chats to Lord Montagu. Patrick and Diana get into a veteran car; Diana puts on a groovy kind of face/eye shield and they drive off; they stop and the director gives instructions to Diana; as they start off again funny business ensues as Diana puts her feet up, then jumps from the car, leaps back in, clutches her head and so on.
Diana, in an evening outfit of a chiffon over harem pants, has her make-up touched up. Another sequence is shot with a different vintage car; when it doesn’t start, Diana gets from the back seat into the front and prepares to drive while Patrick goes to the rear to push, and ends up with a blackened face from the exhaust. He gets in; Diana drives off.
Commentator says the crew are trying to complete all these end sequences in one day’s shooting. Diana, in a blue cat suit, chews gum while receiving direction. In this sequence, Diana and Patrick start to push the veteran car which zooms off without them as they chase after it.
Note: according to a press release on file, this series was the first in Colour. More details in notes on the clothes worn and the filming of these tag pieces; Diana’s costumes were designed by Alan Hughes; Patrick wore his own suits!
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