We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
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I am watching the BBC Ten o’clock News, and the lead story is Condoleezza Rice, spelling out the Bush doctrine:
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has delivered a forceful call for democratic reform in the Arab World in a major policy speech in Cairo.
The US pursuit of stability in the Middle East at the expense of democracy had “achieved neither”, she admitted.
“Now, we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people,” she said.
The BBC’s Frank Gardiner said her comments marked a complete departure for the US, and were “immensely risky”.
Indeed. In order to have seen this one coming, you would have had to have read some of President George W. Bush’s speeches, in particular his Second Inaugural Address, and to have then made the even greater mental leap of realising that President George W. Bush had actually thought about what he was saying, and had meant it.
So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world. (Applause.)
As the BBC immediately explained, the worry is that democracy in the Middle East may result in Islamomaniacal governments which “hate America”. As opposed to regimes like the ones in Egypt and Saudi Arabia now, which permit no anti-American sentiments whatsoever.
Now the BBC is explaining that Egypt, like the USSR before it, is immovably non-democratic. Mubarak will be followed in the fullness of time only by further Mubaraks. We shall see.
President George W. Bush is a physically quite little guy, or so he seems in the photos that I have seen. He has an eccentric way with the English language, his pauses extending to the point where they flirt dangerously with embarrassment. He believes – really believes – in God. So, he is an easy man to underestimate, and all of Europe now does this. Yet if US Presidential greatness is defined as determining a new course for the USA and then making that new course the actual course that is then steered by (which it is, although there is also the matter of whether the new course is good and wise to consider), then President George W. Bush is getting greater by the month.
I had all kinds of plans of Things To Do over the weekend, but instead I spent my time following the news, with growing disbelief, of Australia losing two cricket matches, yesterday against England which was a bit of a surprise, and on Saturday against Bangladesh which was a cricket earthquake. The Aussies will probably pull themselves together by the time the test matches come around, because they are, after all, the Aussies, the best cricket team in the world. But they have now lost four games in a row, which is quite a hiccup by their standards. They lost the twenty over thrash against England last Monday, heavily, and then they lost to Somerset in a fifty-over warm-up game. And now they have lost these two games. As you can imagine, the British media are having a fine old wallow. → Continue reading: Are the Aussies at last becoming fallible?
“Paul Wolfowitz’s nomination to lead the World Bank could turn out to be the right and inspired choice, following on the heels of John Bolton’s nomination as US ambassador to the UN. Both are political realists who appreciate the power of the USA to provide the global Pax and promote a liberal international economic order. Both are sceptics of international organisations and have no time for global-governance chatter. Now Mr Wolfowitz should marry his political realism with economic liberalism. The World Bank should promote markets and economic freedom in the developing world, but with more modest, pared-down means and ends. It should emphasise information-sharing, the exchange of ideas, policy surveillance and technical assistance. But its power of the purse through project and programme lending should be overhauled and kept within strict limits. And global-governance fantasists should be told where to get off.”
– Dr Razeen Sally of the London School of Economics in the report 2005 and Beyond: The Future of Trade, Development & International Institutions (PDF)
Sorry but this was too funny to leave languishing in the comments section. For our non-UK readers, the Eurostar train currently terminates at the railway station in London rejopicing in the name of Waterloo:
Now that our relationship with France has reverted to its traditional millennium-long condition, can we be assured that before the Channel Tunnel Rail Link is finally completed in a year or two, the Eurostar London terminus at St Pancras will be renamed to align it more closely politically, historically and emotionally with the name of the present terminus south of the river?
Trafalgar, Salamanca, Vittoria, Blenheim, Crecy or Agincourt are just a few of the most obvious candidates history has so bountifully provided us with. A rather more modern choice, from 1940, might be Mers-el-Kebir…
Would not the choice of name make a particularly fine subject for a referendum?
Heh! I vote for Mers-el-Kebir as we can probably fool the multi-cultis into thinking we are being ‘culturally inclusive’ by choosing a non-European name!
“I think that maybe – just maybe – anti-Wal Mart sentiment has more to do with an aversion to the white, rural ethnology the store sometimes represents than its labor practices. We can’t have our Ethiopian restaurants and esoteric bookstores blighted by NASCAR culture.”
– The always good American blogger Radley Balko, telling it like it is.
Laziness in blogging is defined as examining the attitude of the United Nations or any other NGO in regard to some humanitarian crisis caused by your common garden dictator. Easy and rich pickings. For this particular example, let us take Robert “Gay Gangster” Mugabe as an egregious example of dictatorial excess and the World Food Programme as your normal international bureaucracy.
In reality, “Mad Bob” has ruined his country, urinated on the poor and used food aid as a tool of oppression and death. In UNWorld, Comrade Bob is a welcome member of the international community. As James Morris, ‘United Nations Special Envoy for Humanitarian Affairs for Southern Africa’ (such a big title for an oh-so important man), stated recently:
Mr Morris said the President told him that Zimbabwe welcomed assistance that was purely humanitarian.
“We have had a very positive discussion with President Mugabe. We have had a very good working relationship for several years. The President said he welcomed food assistance that comes with humanitarian commitment,” said Mr Morris.
He said Zimbabwe and the World Food Programme (WFP), a UN agency, had a good working relationship stretching over several years.
Mr Morris knows that this is the case because Comrade Mugabe is committed to agricultural reform.
The UN envoy said it emerged during his talks with Cde Mugabe that the President was committed to the development of agriculture and ensuring food security in Zimbabwe.
“I thank the President for his commitment to agriculture,” said Mr Morris.
The website of the World Food Programme is slightly better (or worse, if you think that a chink of reality can be damned by faint praise). Their “In Brief” on Mr Morris’s visit to Zimbabwe notes many contributing factors, but the state is not given the starring role it deserves:
Food production in Zimbabwe is affected by several factors, including erratic rains, shortages of inputs such as fertilizer and inadequate tillage.
It is also affected by the spread of HIV/AIDS, which commonly afflicts people in their most productive years.
Moreover, the centralized pricing structure for maize in Zimbabwe creates a disincentive for production above subsistence levels.
However, a key reason for food shortages this year will be drought.
The commercial farming sector, which declined as a result of land reform, previously provided an important stabilising factor in maize production, particularly during years of erratic rains, as the crop was mainly produced by irrigation.
While communal farms traditionally produce the greater portion of food, they are largely dependent on rainfall.
This post is the product of laziness or the United Nations is a turkey shoot! Take your pick!
Samizdata readers may remember my article about this amazing little battle. It clearly showed what happens when irregulars ambush real soldiers.
With great pleasure I now report a follow up to the story: three members of this fine bunch, Sgt. Leigh Ann Hester, Staff Sgt. Timothy Nein and Spc. Jason Mikhave have been awarded the Silver Star.
Well done and congratulations guys!
Clive Davis has linked to an interesting, if controversial article, that argues the liberal wing of the blogosphere is now more popular, in terms of pageviews, than the conservative and libertarian community.
The left-wing blogosphere is beginning to decidedly pull away from the right wing blogosphere in terms of traffic. This is largely a result of the open embrace of community blogging on the left and the stagnant, anti-meritorious nature of the right-wing blogosphere that pushes new, emerging voices to the margins.
The article proceeds to describe and examine two different models of political blogging defined by the political orientation of the writers. New entrants into the conservative/libertarian blogosphere have to create their own blogs and rely upon a trickle-down effect, whereas community moderated blogging platforms used by the liberal left appear to reduce the obstacles that a new generation of emergent left bloggers have had to face.
Unless right-wing blogs decide to open up and allow their readers to have a greater voice, I expect that the liberal and progressive blogosphere will continue its unborken twenty-month rise in relative traffic. Conservative bloggers continue to act as though they are simply a supplement to the existing pundit class, without any need to converse with those operating outside of a small social bubble or any need to engage people within the new structure of the public sphere.
Are these valid criticisms? Has the focus upon the reformation of the existing media blinded the conservative and libertarian blogosphere to the need for further change and adaptation as the ‘world of blogs’ continues to develop? Is this part of the blogosphere stagnating?
What did you do to help the victims and survivors of the Asian Tsunami? Did you help to raise money. Did you don your jogging bottoms and wheeze your way through a sponsored run? Did you sit in bathtub full of maggots for twenty-fours hours? Did you gladly humiliate yourself by joining in with a charity sing-a-thon? Did you run around like headless chicken collecting cuddly toys, blankets and unwanted packs of paracetamol?
Or maybe you just plunged your hand generously into your own pocket, scooped out a chunk of change and handed it over with the (understandably) sincere intentions of doing just a little to help ease the plight of the unfortunate victims of that catastrophe.
If you did any of those things, well, you have certainly provided relief to some quarters:
Oxfam has had to pay £550,000 in customs duty to the Sri Lankan government for importing 25 four-wheel-drive vehicles to help victims of the tsunami, The Daily Telegraph has learned.
The sum was levied by customs in Colombo which have refused to grant tax exemptions to non-governmental organisations working to repair damage caused by the giant Boxing Day wave.
The Indian-made Mahindra vehicles, essential to negotiate damaged roads and rough tracks, remained stuck in port at Colombo for almost a month as officials completed the small mountain of paperwork required to release them. Customs charged £2,750 “demurrage” for every day they stood idle.
So there we have it, good people. Kindly Westerners care more about the sodden, bedraggled, impoverished masses of Sri Lanka than their own government which has made a priority of cutting off its own pound (or several hundred thousands of pounds) of flesh first. And this is only the stuff that is being reported. Try to imagine, if you can, the graft and pilfering that is going on underneath the radar.
As for Oxfam, I can spare no words of comfort. Their incessant mewling about ‘fair trade’ means putting even more power and looted wealth into the hands of the kind of third-world government spivs who have just royally shafted them. I doubt very much if they will learn anything useful from this object lesson. These people seldom do.
If I had suggested, in the days following the disaster, that all those munificent donations were going to be stolen then the comments section of this blog would have experienced a mini-tsunami of its own as a wave of furious readers flooded in to inform me that I had “reached new lows”. Too cynical? There is no such thing as ‘too cynical’. Allow me to put the record straight: every penny of that relief fund is eventually going to worm its way into the pockets of state officials and professional Western poverty-mongers.
The Emperor was always naked but now he’s running around flashing his genitals as well.
“Cough, cough, cough,” I spluttered down the telephone in shock when told the price. Markets are, in general, excellent at making things cost less – so effective that we are sometimes encouraged by campaigners to pay extra. So what was it that made me aghast at its high price? It was something called an ISDN mixer.
A few days ago I was in a BBC studio late at night once again. I really like doing radio, but at the same time I would prefer to be doing evening and late-night radio from home with a mug of tea. The problem is that, understandably, the BBC does not like you doing interviews down an ordinary phone line because of the poor sound quality. So while at the BBC, I got a pen and jotted down the make of the ISDN mixer being used.
What’s with this ISDN mixer I am talking about? Apparently ISDN calls are not good quality on their own: I am told you need this ISDN mixer thing which has something called a “g722 audio codec”, and it is this codec which makes the call quality broadcast standard. And do you know how much one of these ISDN mixers cost? The make the Beeb uses is £1679 + VAT, excluding microphone and headphones, but I found another make (used by an impressive range of charities and trade unions) which costs a few hundred less. Still, it seems remarkably pricey for what is essentially a box with a few buttons and a printed circuit board.
I am writing this for two reasons. One, it is possible that an enlightened reader will post a comment explaining that what I need is called an XYZ and costs $79 at Wal-Mart. The second reason is to make the point that markets are a process, not an end state. The high price is not market failure (inasmuch as I do not think there is justification for the government to start making the things), but I do think lots of Chinese companies ought to enter the ISDN mixer market. Let’s hope.
There is an excellent article in the print version of The Economist describing the situation in the Congo.
That’s the Congo. Private cellphone networks work and private airlines work because the landlines do not and the bush has eaten the roads. Public servants serve mostly to make life difficult for the public, in the hope of squeezing some cash out of them. Congo is a police state, but without the benefits. The police have unchecked powers, but provide little security. Your correspondent needed three separate permits to visit the railway station in Kinshasa, where he was stopped and questioned six times in 45 minutes. Yet he found that all the seats, windows and light fixtures has been stolen from the trains.
I put this paragraph up for all those people who have not experienced this sort of thing first hand and cannot accept that the single biggest obstacle to ending poverty in Africa is the nature of African nation states. Until that changes, sending aid under all but the most controlled circumstances is more often than not either subsidising the very people who cause the problems in the first place or, at best, flushing 90¢ on the dollar down the toilet in terms of helping the people you really want to benefit from your largess.
The solution? Good question, but it sure as hell is not more of the same. In Africa even more than most other places, truly, the state is not your friend.
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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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