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Another enforced absence from regular blogging can be explained (if not necessarily forgiven) by my currently being in Northern California on business.
Yes, here I am in downtown Monterey, seated at a table in ‘Bay Books’ internet cafe on the corner of Alvarado and Franklin.
While the climate is most agreeable, I must just say that this is not at all what I was expecting to find in ‘George Bush’s Amerikkka’. I have been here for very nearly a week now and I have not stumbled across a single Gulag. Perhaps they are all very well hidden. And if there are any Fascist Death Squads operating in the area, then the report of their rifles are being drowned out by the barking of the seals in Monterey Bay.
In fact, the only visibly disturbing characteristics of this place are a few too many ageing hippies and a zealous crusade against smokers. There are, however, compensations. It is mid-November and I can walk about in shirtsleeves during the day.
I cannot honestly say that I am enjoying myself but that is only because I have such a busy work schedule. I can say that I look forward to coming back here again.
I will be returning to Blighty early next week whereupon normal service will resume.
I hear the term “Anglosphere” as meaning that there is some community of the English-speaking nations on either side of the Atlantic Ocean. But when I come across this site, I feel like I am living in a foreign country to Americans.
Trying to list all the reasons why Adopt a Sniper is definitely not an English website would take hours. And that is a shame.
[via Instapundit]
I have to say I got a totally different impression from yesterday’s blog event from Brian. The point that came across was that we needed to move beyond the hype – for example that blogs make politics more important to people’s lives and therefore all MPs should be given taxpayer money to blog. I once heard someone claim that blogs were great because they allow everyone’s views to count equally. But they do not. While the printing press permitted those with sufficient funds to vanity publish their thoughts, it did not enable worthless books to get read. With blogs, you have to write good content and build up a readership who come back because they like it. The blogosphere is a meritocracy.
It is precisely the virtue of the blogosphere that blogs act as a filter. Boring, uninteresting blogs do not get read. That’s a feature, not a bug.
When you cut away the hype, you see real uses of the technology. William Heath, one of the speakers, talks about how blogs really can help bring fresh thinking to policy problems. He spoke on how his blog Ideal Government has enabled dozens of diverse thinkers on government IT – including users and geeks, as well as purchasers – to share what they think about how government IT could be made to work better. That is a real use of blog technology to improve communication. It has been presented to and read by the government’s Chief Information Officer.
Stephen Pollard talked of how blogs are not replacing the existing media, but they are serving an important role in fact checking. His own blog is very popular, which I would suggest helps his ‘brand’ stand out further among newspaper columnists, and it also lets him talk about things he wouldn’t be able to sell an article on.
So the seminar’s theme was not that blogs are no big deal, but that we need to move away from the hype and look at real end uses of the technology. There has been too much sloppy thinking about blogs in the past, often by those who desperately want politics to count more. As Perry de Havilland said, blogs tend to be more anti-establishment, having severely tarnished the likes of CBS News’s Dan Rather in the US, and tend to open authority to more scrutiny than in the past. Blogs are starting, however, to be used as important tools, especially by those with views to express. As I pointed out at the event, the ASI gets a fair few media calls as a result of topical pieces that have been posted on its blog. So it answers a need to be able to publish quickly a position on something and get noticed by the mainstream media, by government departments and politicians and so on. Let’s forget the hype and look at where it does useful tasks.
Last night I attended this event, about Blogs, Democracy, etc.
The atmosphere radiating from the panel of speakers was odd. They all had in common that they were concerned above all not to get too enthusiastic about blogging. One sensed that both the dot.com boom and the current enthusiasm for blogging that radiates from sad little blogging enthusiasts like me had affected them far too deeply for their own good. To me they sounded like people saying in, say, 1550, that all this hype about the impact that printing was destined to have was all rather overdone. → Continue reading: Democracy and the blogosphere? No big deal
The Republican party is normally presented by the media and academia as the anti Welfare State party – the ‘liberal’ (i.e. statist) establishment denounce the Republicans as the party of cuts in government spending and wicked deregulation.
And yet when the Republicans win an election, most libertarians are not very pleased. Of course we are happy to see the media people upset or the academics in despair, but we do not really expect the Republicans to roll back the entitlement programs or slash and burn the mass of regulations. The reason for this, many libertarians tell themselves, is that Republicans are no good – they talk the language of freedom, but when put to the test they fail the voters who supported them.
However, there is another point of view and this is that most voters (including many people who vote Republican) just do not support liberty and would turn against the Republicans if they ever seriously tried to roll back government. → Continue reading: Why we should not expect to much from the Republicans: Or the lessons of 1936
I snapped this outside the Victoria Street (London SW1) branch of Sainsbury’s on Monday evening. It’s too dark to see much of the bloke actually selling those Evening Standards, but his message is clear.
Sainsbury’s has been taking a bit of a beating at the hands of Tesco just lately. But this is bad news for Tesco.
This is an excellent story. I got to it from here.
A bag of bills stolen from a casino was snapped up by beavers who wove thousands of dollars in soggy currency into the sticks and brush of their dam on a creek in eastern Louisiana.
“They hadn’t torn the bills up. They were still whole,” said Maj. Michael Martin of the St. Helena Parish Sheriff’s Office.
The money was part of $70,000 to $75,000 taken last week from the Lucky Dollar Casino in Greensburg.
Is there not some kind of law saying that you are not allowed to do this kind of thing in the USA? No doubt the beavers have by now appointed a lawyer to represent their interests. An eagle perhaps? Never mind.
A few years ago I read of lower spine stimulation by a doctor working with paralyzed patients. It had ‘interesting’ effects when done in just the right spot. Another, or perhaps the same doctor, Stuart Meloy, a Winston-Salem, North Carolina anesthesiologist and pain specialist, has been experimenting with an FDA approved stimulation device for lower back pain. At least one woman in his pain trial had breathtakingly enjoyable orgasms along with the pain abatement.
Other work I have read reports there is a lower spinal nerve area which controls the timing of ejaculation in men. Perhaps it is the same? The article does not say. Dr. Meloy has completed an initial medical trial on the use of the stimulator, now dubbed the ‘orgasmatron’, by women with orgasmic dysfunction. According to women in the trial, it works exceedingly well.
It may beat the knickers off a vibrator, but at $17,000 for surgical implantation this will definitely be a rich girl’s toy. I wonder if anyone has asked Woody Allen for a comment?
The ‘mainstreaming’ of the blog phenomenon continues apace as more applications for blogging start to join political prognostication, cultural commentary, demimonde diaries (warning: X-rated), technical tantrums, hitting things with hammers and paeans to beloved pussycats. New neighbourhoods of the blogosphere are springing up every day.
And now an independent Hollywood movie called Blowing Smoke, which is still undergoing some final post production editing, has set up a blog to which the director, producer and cast members have started to post, talking about the extremely politically incorrect nature of the movie.
The blog is still in its very early days, the site is still being tweaked and the users are at the stage where they are just getting to grips with blog publishing software but I think this could quite interesting if blogs like this catch on. As a movie enthusiast myself I would love to get more peeks behind the scenes and not just the same old marketing agency hype.
A remake of Do They Know It’s Christmas? has just been recorded.
Some of the brightest stars of British pop and rock music recorded a new version of Do They Know Its Christmas? yesterday, 20 years after the original became an international hit and raised millions for famine relief in Africa.
[…]
Chris Martin from Coldplay, Will Young, the Pop Idol winner, Justin Hawkins, frontman for The Darkness, Ms Dynamite and Joss Stone, the soul singer, were among the host of stars to attend.
It says everything about Band Aid, the original version, that what is still remembered as if it was yesterday are the various performances and pronouncements made by those pop stars, but that little attention is spared to even ask what exactly, if anything, was achieved with all that money.
Consider this, from a piece in the Spectator by Daniel Wolfe a few weeks back:
Geldof was the front man, and he has played his part to perfection, then and ever since. This is not to impugn his motives: Geldof is undeniably charming and sincere, but that does not mean that what he says is holy writ. He told the international media that agencies had to trust the representatives of the Mengistu government, thus seeming to deny, by implication, that the aid operation was being used by that same government. Yet the places where the aid was distributed, and the conditions under which it was distributed, were determined by Mengistu. There is something remarkably patronising in the assumption that an African dictator – as ruthless and cunning as they come, a survivor among survivors – might fail to see an opportunity when it was staring him in the face.
As it turned out, Mengistu knew a hawk from a handsaw. In 1984–85, up to a billion dollars’ worth of aid flowed into Ethiopia. Thousands of Western aid workers and journalists flew in with it. The regime ensured that the visitors converted their Western dollars to the local currency at a rate favourable to the government: in 1985 the Dergue tripled its foreign currency reserves. It used this influx of cash to help build up its war-machine, it commandeered aid vehicles for its own purposes and, by diverting aid supplies, helped feed its armies. The UN in Addis Ababa, which was co-ordinating the aid operation, denied that the level of diversion was significant. Later on, it became clear that a significant proportion of the relief food in Tigray – the epicentre of the famine – was consigned to the militia. The militias were known locally as ‘wheat militias’.
Above all, the government used the aid operation to support its military strategy: it saw food aid as both a tool for consolidating control over disputed territory and as bait for luring people from rebel-held areas into government territory…
And so on.
And now? Another war. Another famine. Another generation of popsters eager to help. I do not blame them, not the younger ones. They want to help. They like singing and playing their guitars, for this is what they do. If they are hoping for the best as a result of their efforts, rather than fearing the worst, this is hardly their fault. They mean well.
Geldof, on the other hand, ought to have learned something by now. Twenty years ago, he gouged a ton of money out of everyone, and became a secular saint. This time around, the assumption he still seems to be basing all his efforts on is that although flinging money at Africa may not do as much good as it might, it surely cannot do any great harm. But alas, if a lot of the ‘aid’ goes to the people who are causing a lot of the misery out there, then his ‘aid’ may indeed do some serious harm.
While checking out the special offers that British supermarkets have on at the moment, I found myself at Somerfield‘s website a few minutes ago. Despite all of the nonsense that has come from the British government over the years, and especially in recent months, I was still shocked when I read a link asking Somerfield customers to register their views on the government’s plans to ban buy one get one free offers. Surely even this nanny government would not come up with so ridiculous and controlling a measure, I thought.
Well, I thought wrong – they are indeed that mindbogglingly dumb and power-mad, and plan to do exactly that. So, businesses can forget being free to offer their customers bargains on foods the government deems ‘unhealthy’. (The state apparently has no idea that it is possible to consume those evil ‘unhealthy’ foods in moderation and still be a healthy individual. Not that it matters, since the state has already decided that the average citizen is too stupid to choose what to put into his or her own mouth, and that our entire society should be dumbed down in order to compensate it, no matter the effects on commerce and personal liberty.)
I am in general an optimist, but when it comes to the government’s fetish for domination of individuals, I am nothing but a pessimist. In the mind of our legislators, the opinion of the average voter (voter, not person) seems all too similar to this parody by frequent Samizdata commenter Chris Goodman:
Food ought to be banned, or at least rationed by trained medical staff in public service centres, since people are not rational enough to use it properly. At the very least food should be labelled “Food can be bad for you”. Those who make billions of pounds growing and distributing food should not be allowed to give people what they want. It turns my stomach to think of all those multinationals making money out of producing delicious food. There ought to be a march against it. Think of the children! In a modern society politicians have a democratic mandate that decide what we should have for tea each day. I vote for the party that raises taxes in order to pay for more regulators.
As Dr Sean Gabb, a guy who says much I disagree with but who hits the nail on the head on this issue, puts it:
Whenever the government does something for us, it takes away from our own ability to do that for ourselves. This diminishes us as human beings. Better, I suggest, a people who often eat and drink too much, and who on average die a few years before they might, than a people deprived of autonomy and shepherded into a few extra years of intellectual and moral passivity.
At the rate Britain is going, you might think we have a large crop of intellectually and morally passive octogenarians to look forward to in a few decades’ time. Sadly, I have no confidence whatsoever that these restrictions on personal and commercial freedom will produce the results desired by the government – except, of course, for more power in the hands of the state. Woe betide the fools who vote for these people, and those of us who will not but who will suffer at their hands regardless.
This is a very odd piece of reportage, from Spiegel Online:
Finally some news out of Holland that doesn’t have to do with the religious violence that has gripped the country for the last 10 days: The Dutch cabinet has decided on a March 2005 withdrawal of the country’s 1,350 troops in Iraq. Dutch Defense Minister Henk Kamp made the announcement on Friday afternoon.
What, not anything to do with it? Surely the Dutch cabinet at least hopes that Dutch Muslims will be slightly less angry about everything now, even if the actual decision to bring the boys home was made either before all the domestic rowing, or during it but for genuinely unrelated reasons.
And some will certainly argue that there is a connection, so there is your connection right there.
I do not say that the religious violence was the sole cause of the withdrawal, merely that these are definitely inter-woven news stories.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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