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.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
|
Well, I had to return to normality eventually. I have just come back with the new Mrs Pearce from Mauritius, an island in the Indian Ocean lying off the east coast of Africa and south of the Equator. An extremely interesting island with a mixed history and a heady brew of different cultures, part Anglosphere, part French, part Indian and part African.(Here is a good collection of literature linked to it). About 11 hours direct flying time from London, the island is pretty much geared these days as a “romantic destination in the tropics”. I liked the place and its people a lot as we travelled around the various nature parks, looking at the coral reefs, the fish, birdlife and assorted animals. If I have one grumble it is that, much to my amazement, the whole island is besotted with English football. Egads, I go all this way and they are still raving about the World Cup.
It is funny what sticks in the mind, often completely unexpected. I discovered that the island produces some of the finest and most fantastically detailed model boats I have ever seen. You can, for a fraction of what it would cost in Britain, buy a scale model wooden Victory, or Constitution, or Sovereign of the Seas, or an America’s Cup racer, WW2 battleship, cruiser or Blue Riband liner. There is a substantial industry of locals churning out these boats. The Napoleonic era – when Mauritius was seized by the British from the French – seems to provide the inspiration for most of the models. Unable to resist – I am an amateur sailor anyway – my wife and I bought a model of the 1840s U.S. schooner Albatros, now sitting proudly on the mantelpiece. Hardwoods are the base for much of the boats that are made and as a result, will last for years. The detailing on the rigging, sails, tiny cannon and masts are incredible. (Okay, I am an overgrown boy at heart).
And of course while on the island I read Patrick O’Brien’s The Mauritius Command. For a moment, sitting on the beach sipping a beer, I thought I saw Lucky Jack Aubrey walking along, staring out to sea to spot French raiders…
Anyway, it has been good to give blogging a miss for a while and re-charge the writing batteries. Thanks to everyone for their good wishes and messages. I really appreciate it.
Oh, how quickly smug, self-righteous smiles can turn into outraged gasping. I was quite pleased to see Japan, Norway, Iceland and others eventually get one over the woolly-thinking Western mouth-foamers at the recent International Whaling Commission meeting in St Kitts & Nevis. Of course, this is a mostly symbolic victory for those in favour of harvesting resources. In a practical sense, it may improve the pro-whaling camp’s ability to set the agenda at future IWC get-togethers. This achievement was dwarfed, however, by the far more notable victory enjoyed by the anti-whalers earlier in the conference. The Japanese attempted to enact secret ballot voting at IWC conferences, and failed. This is a considerable strategic defeat, because secret ballots would have significantly enhanced the appeal of Japan’s chequebook diplomacy in the eyes of swinging IWC members, who might otherwise be concerned about domestic political consequences should they choose to vote with the Japanese. Regardless of the relative unimportance of the Japanese camp’s win – and the relative importance of the anti-whaling bloc’s success at the meeting – the usual suspects are up in arms, like they always are. More on that later.
I believe Japan would require a two-thirds majority of members to overturn the moratorium on whaling that is currently in place, and they have no hope of mustering those kinds of numbers any time soon. Personally, I think Japan should simply follow Norway’s lead and unilaterally discard the moratorium. Stop using this ‘scientific research’ nonsense as a pretext for a perfectly legitimate operation. The Japanese – and any other nation – have an absolute right to harvest the whale resource in international waters. They do not need to make excuses to anyone. It is time they looked the anti-whaling hysterics like Australia, Great Britain, New Zealand and their shrieking NGO allies in the eye and told the lot of them to get stuffed.
Take Greenpeace genius Danny Kennedy, walking the usual carping course:
It would be a stupidity really for civilisation to go back to this old barbaric business – which there is no demand for, I’ll note, in this day and age – and actually deplete the asset that the whale-watched business is based on.
Stupidity? How is this for stupidity, you stupid, stupid, stupid man; if there is no demand for whaling, why do you work for an organisation that helps make the dispute more intractable by whipping up ‘pro’ and ‘anti’ mobs and creating political obduracy in Japan over the issue? Can you not see why Japan subsidises its whaling industry? How long would the Japanese government subsidise its whaling industry if the passion was sucked out of the debate? Why not let whaling die a natural death – as it otherwise would in a decade or so – if left unperturbed by environmental crusaders? Do you revel in being counterproductive towards your stated aims, Danny Kennedy?
If anyone is interested, I have previously made the case for dropping the moratorium on whaling here.
What happens when you combine 200 liters of Diet Coke and over 523 Mentos mints? EepyBird.com has the answer in the form of the Extreme Diet Coke & Mentos Experiments.
AmazonBay by Sean Park is a short film about where technology and trends in financial markets get us in 2015. Fantastic. Literally.
Thanks to a brush with the financial services in my previous life, the film brought a rueful smile to my face. Especially the bit about assets and cashflows of government programmes being managed dynamically and in real time and with perfect liquidity and every financial instrument…
Heh. Watch the whole thing.
Link via Confused of Calcutta.
Hrm. Sorry to plunge you all into the bizarre depths of DailyKos twice in the space of a week, but some of the goings on there are quite amusing. If I was a psychologist, I would say professionally intriguing. Take DailyKos commenter “CheChe” and the – erm – unusual relationship he appears to have with his daughter. Here’s an excerpt from his post, which is so tragi-comic it is hard not to laugh out loud when reading it:
I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a look of misery and dejection on the face of my daughter as I just did a moment ago.
I sat down with her on the sofa and (as calmly as I could) tried to explain to her why the Senate Republicans want to drain the treasury in order to give every American a $100 check. I tried to keep my voice steady, but it became increasingly difficult – the rage and feelings of helplessnes were just too much. I think my daughter could tell something was wrong. I found myself at such a loss for words – nothing made any sense; nothing makes sense anymore. I finally had to admit, “Honey, I just don’t know – I don’t know what’s going on in this country anymore…”
When I finished her lower lip started to tremble and her eyes began to fill with tears, “Daddy” she said, “why are the Republicans doing this to the country?” Well, that was it for me: I finally fell apart. She just fell into my arms and we both began sobbing for several minutes.
Er…right. How old is this child? Does she even know what $100 is worth? Of course, the policy itself is utterly ridiculous, but that’s hardly the point.
Now, there is something really odd about this CheChe character’s comments. He takes the exact same wordage from a previous comment he wrote relaying his daughter’s earlier misery, and then superimposes another Kos talking point as the source of his little girl’s current terror and sadness to create a new saga:
I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a look of misery and dejection on the face of my daughter as I just did a moment ago. She just couldn’t understand why the President would be spying on everyone. “Even my Grandma?” she asked pitifully. […] When I finished her lower lip started to tremble and her eyes began to fill with tears, “Daddy” she said, “why are the Republicans doing this to the country?” Well, that was it for me: I finally fell apart. She just fell into my arms and we both began sobbing for several minutes.
They have a lot of these kinds of chats; here’s another. Same scenario, different bogeyman:
I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a look of misery and dejection on the face of my daughter as I just did a moment ago. She just couldn’t understand why the President would be going to Iraq when so many things are wrong in this country. “Doesn’t Mr. Bush care about us anymore?” she asked pitifully.
I sat down with her on the sofa and (as calmly as I could) tried to explain to her why the President seems to be abandoning his country. “Honey, I think his boss, Mr. Rove, sent Mr. Bush out of the country in order to keep himself out of the newspapers. You see, he wasn’t sure if he was going to be arrested today or not, and so he planned Mr. Bush’s trip ahead of time just in case…”
And so on. By now, most would have twigged to the fact that this CheChe fellow might be playing a little jape on the Kos kids. But no. Check out the number of people who “recommended” one of his posts (26), versus those who pointed him out as a troll (2). It is amazing that these plainly fictional tales of crocodile-tear woe hold currency with parts of the American left. To be fair, some people on the thread pointed out CheChe as a rather obvious fraud. His subsequent denial was true to form and hilarious:
I’m simply not going to apologize for loving and comforting my daughter. […] There’s just not enough time to always be writing a new story each and every time something happens, and since this is what happened, it seems fair. Since we lost her mother there hasn’t been a lot of free time around here.
Classic.
(Hat tip: Zoe Brain)
One of my hobbies is photographing landmarks, but in the course of doing this, I spot other less landmarky things, and snap them too. That was the origin of this photo:
It was taken in Harrow, which I visited not long ago, to photograph the new and I think magnificent Wembley football stadium.
Click to see more clothing graphics. Very Samizdata, I hope you agree. Apart, maybe, from where it says John Lennon.
It is my understanding that, in law, First Amendment issues are decided with a preference for the least restrictive alternative. In this context, the PMRC’s demands are the equivalent of treating dandruff by decapitation
– Frank Zappa discussing the Parents Music Resource Center, a pro-censorship group lead by Al Gore’s wife, Tipper Gore
I have been watching the Wikipedia story unfold with great interest. I know that many turn their noses up at this ‘militia encyclopedia’ because of its inherent problem: sometimes contributors either do not know what they are talking about or they are not entering information in good faith.
And yet I often find it is my first port of call when I want some information on a non-critical subject because it is just so damn usable. True, I often tend to cross check data with other sources but if it is regarding a subject I already have some knowledge of (say I want to jog my memory about some detail of the war of the Spanish Succession) or fairly trivial (such as what is Eliza Dushku’s ethnic background (and the answer is Albanian)) I usually just use Wikipedia rather hunt for a book or look elsewhere online.
I have no idea how Wikipedia will develop in the long run but it is already an astonishing example of user-generated content that explodes so many long held notions of value exchange and ‘commons’ that I have a feeling that looking back in twenty or thirty years we may see this experiment as one of the internet’s ‘Gutenberg moments’.
In every language, the first word after “Mama!” that every kid learns to say is “Mine!” A system that doesn’t allow ownership, that doesn’t allow you to say “Mine!” when you grow up, has, to put it mildly, a fatal design flaw.
– Frank Zappa
The Israeli state appears to be doing the same thing that the British state does when it accidentally shoots the wrong person. The latest horror in which a Palestinian family were hit by a shell whilst on a beach is a case in point. The Israeli military is now claiming that it was not a naval shell that had caused the unintended deaths but rather some unexplained mine or old buried shell in the sand which just happened to go off at or about the same time as an Israeli gunboat was shelling a terrorist target in the Gaza strip.
Well that story is coming unravelled and it is a marvel that they thought any reasonable person would believe that during a bombardment from the sea over the heads of the innocent victims, this explosion just ‘happened’ by complete coincidence.
Any critical observer should realise that the Israeli military had no interest in killing the hapless Palestinians who died when one of their rounds went short, so why not admit it was a terrible error and move on?
All concocting fairy tales does is confirm the prejudices of those who see the official Israeli line as being fundamentally untrustworthy. Hamas and their useful idiots in the west will not believe anything done by the Israeli state is not done out of pure malevolence regardless of the facts, so they can be ignored. Israel’s ethno-nationalist cheerleading squad will just assume anything Israel does under any circumstances is completely justified regardless of the facts, so they too can be ignored. However between those two poles of mindless unreason exists a large group of people who tend to judge things on the basis of ‘reasonableness’ and the likely facts.
What the Israeli military spokesman should have said was: “Whilst firing on a legitimate terrorist target, one of our shells went short. It is unclear if this was due to a firing error or a defective round, and as a result some innocent bystanders were killed. We are truly sorry that happened and we wish like hell that the sons of bitches we really were trying to kill did not keep putting us in the position of having to do things like this”.
Mistakes happen and in war, mistakes cost lives. Admit the truth and move on because in the long run it actually helps your cause if people have reason to believe what you say.
I am now donating about $0.01 to the Mises Institute each time I do a search online. As my various writing committments require me to look things up at a rate of at least 20 a day, this means that I am raising a dollar a week (excluding weekends). Goodsearch, a Yahoo-based search engine, donates the money on the basis of the number of searches carried out. Details can be found here.
Most Samizadatistas will disagree with the Mises Insitute for being isolationist on foreign affairs, although this position is motivated more by a refusal to support collectivism (even the ‘good collectivism’ of a war of liberation) rather than the desire to see the USA lose, which is closer to the left’s position.
On the other hand, the Mises Institute is consistently against bad economics, government regulation, taxes and socialist theory as much as practice.
If the Mises Institute is too radically libertarian for your tastes, you can select another charity, you can even switch from time to time. Come to think of it, I could switch beneficiaries as I search different topics, or on different days of the week.
Daryl Hannah was arrested yesterday for sitting in a tree, defending the South Central Farm, a community garden in Los Angeles scheduled for development by the property’s owner, Ralph Horowitz. The City of LA, which has most recently owned the land, had been kind enough to allow locals to use the acreage to grow tomatoes and corn whilst it lay fallow. Then it sold the land to Horowitz, who evily has decided to develop the property…
The kicker? Horowitz is the property’s rightful owner from away back – the city having seized the land from him in the first place in 1986, citing immanent domain, when it wanted to build an incinerator on the site. He’s now being accused of being an ‘evil developer’, and member of the LA Jewish Mafia.
Then along came the D-list celebrity activists, including Hannah and folk singer Joan Baez, who took up the ill-conceived cause, found a tree on the property, and started sitting in it.
Far from being a bleeding-heart shoe-in, the farm is so stinky a lefty effort that the local alt-weekly newspaper, the LA Weekly, ran an investigative expose about thuggery on the part of pro-farm organizers and their intimidation tactics in pressuring the ‘farmers’ to support the ’cause’.
The only net effect, of course, will be to prevent any landowner, including the government, from allowing community gardens anywhere, ever, or any other benevolent use of property, for fear of squatter confiscation.
A brutally ‘fair’ outcome, satisfactory only to those who fail to recognize that unfairness is the basis of benevolence – it is what we call charity.
|
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.
|
