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]
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This just in from a Jane’s newsletter:
Nation state may be behind computer worm attack on Iranian nuclear plant. The first known example of a computer worm designed to target major infrastructure facilities has infected the personal computers of employees in Iran’s Bushehr nuclear power station. The malware, known as Stuxnet, is capable of taking control of an industrial plant by targeting weaknesses in systems designed by German company Siemens that are used to manage water supplies, oil rigs, power plants and other utilities.
I pretty much thought this had to be the case. The problem is, this is a double edged sword. Stuxnet has been seen in the wild enough to be picked up and reported on by Symantec. That means it has also been picked up by white and black hats alike and will be reverse engineered and used for other ‘payloads’. This is the inherent problem with the viral software attack. Once you use it, you might as well have posted the source code with a Gnu Public License on it.
So, now that we have proof by example that embedded process control systems can be hijacked by a virus, we had better start worrying who else is going to get targeted by slightly modified versions.
“It is true that individual financial institutions made bad decisions. In my opinion, they should have been allowed to go out of business—that would have been the proper way for them to be handled. However, their decisions were secondary to government policy. It should be remembered that the Federal Reserve owns the monetary system in the United States; we do not have a private monetary system. In 1913, our monetary system was nationalized. If you’re having problems in the monetary system—which is where the problems in the economy began—they are, by definition, government problems. This is analogous to interstate highway bridges falling down: If interstate highway bridges were falling down, everyone would recognize that the government owns the highways and conclude that this is a government-caused problem. Well, the government owns the monetary system, and the errors by the Federal Reserve are the foundations of the financial problems we’ve experienced.”
John Allison, former CEO of BB&T, who is that rarity in financial services, a genuine free marketer who knows what the prime cause of the credit disaster has been.
(The quote is taken from an interview of Allison by The Objective Standard, a fine magazine. Most of the articles are behind the subscriber firewall.)
It looks as if some reporters who wrote about the late British comic actor, Norman Wisdom, have learned – assuming they actually gave a shit in the first place – that using Wikipedia as your source for information is a high-risk strategy.
Doh.
This is a headline in the leftist New Republic magazine, over an article lauding any kind of US government spending, by Jonathan Cohn:
“Wanted: More Fraud, Abuse in Government Spending”
Here’s a paragraph to show just how far down the Keynesian rabbit-hole parts of the pro-stimulus crowd have gone:
“But efficiency isn’t the Recovery Act’s primary purpose. Reviving the economy is. And that’s required spending a vast amount of money very quickly–a goal that, inevitably, is at odds with spending the money carefully. Or, to put it another way, a stimulus that threw a little more money away might have created more jobs.”
So “throwing away” money – which is ultimately not the government’s to “throw away” but belongs, or is claimed, from individual citizens – “creates” jobs, does it? So if the US unemployment rate is stubbornly holding just below 10 per cent – a miserable result – then what is needed is yet even more spending, more money printing. These guys remind me of what was said, not always fairly I might add, of WW1 generals, who, when faced with the failure of their latest mass infantry assaults against the German army in Flanders, were urged for one more push, one more bout of bloodletting and hence on to victory.
Einstein once defined madness, I recall, as the repeating of an error and failing to learn from such errors over, and over again. By that measure, parts of the media and commentariat in the US are out of their conceited, Keynesian minds.
Geert Wilders is on trial today for telling it like it is with his film ‘Fitna’.
If you are a blogger, read up on the subject and get out the support. Europe may not have Freedom of Speech with teeth in it, but perhaps you can provide that poor benighted continent with implants.
Patrick Crozier reports on another ripple spreading outwards from the Cobden Centre:
CNBC is much better than the BBC. But that is not saying much. For the most part it offers up a stream of Keynesians with a smattering of Monetarists.
So, imagine my surprise when I turned on today to hear someone talking sense. Real, proper, honest-to-Godness, complete, free-market, Austrian sense. I even spent the next half an hour glued to the show just so I could catch his name.
I succeeded. The guy’s name is Sean Corrigan and he works for these people.
Oh, and he writes for the Cobden Centre. …
Corrigan is indeed excellent, as I found out for myself when I heard him speak at a Cobden Centre organised meeting at the IEA. What marks him out from other people who have jobs as Somethings in the City is that whereas most such persons are only now asking themselves: “What the hell just happened?”, Corrigan was asking himself: “What the hell is happening?” about a decade ago or more. And, as Patrick Crozier notes, he got the answers right too.
Unlike, says Patrick in his immediately following posting, George Osborne.
Godwin doesn’t apply where people really are laughing along about exterminating their opponents.
– House of Dumb. I agree. It’s okay to call people nazis if they did it first.
A half brick. That’s about how musical I am as.
So I’m no judge of an orchestra, but Simon Heffer in the Telegraph seems to think the New Queen’s Hall Orchestra is pretty good. The unusual thing about this orchestra is that it does not receive Arts Council funding.
I have to say that the fact that it gets some of its money from the patronage of the Duchess of Cornwall means that it cannot claim to be entirely independent of the State, since I presume she gets much of her money from the Civil List. But there you go. If one has to have state subsidies for the arts it is much more in the proper style that the dosh should come from the bejewelled hands of the former mistress, now wife, of the Prince of Wales than by filling in a grants form. I rather hope she hands over a velvet bag of gold sovereigns instead of writing a cheque.
I digress right royally. Here is what Simon Heffer writes about the orchestra’s founder, John Boyden:
He has serious convictions about arts funding – in particular, he believes that the market for orchestral music is so distorted by public funding that innovation is almost impossible. Until the Arts Council’s predecessor began funding orchestras just after the war, serious music depended on ticket sales and the patronage of the wealthy. Before the late 1940s, the LSO (a company owned by its players) paid dividends. Now it receives £2,355,836 (in 2010/11) from the Arts Council alone.
Mr Boyden believes that by keeping the price of tickets artificially low, the gap between an orchestra and its audience has become a gulf. He believes that other orchestras use their Arts Council funding to undercut orchestras such as his, taking up residencies in the provinces that are only made possible by the taxpayer’s largesse. The state does not contemplate pulling the plug on these famous institutions and, as a result, everything in the orchestral world is static. Mr Boyden argues, with some justification, that the last piece of new music to seize the public imagination was Britten’s War Requiem 48 years ago – because the music now written for these orchestras is created to satisfy not the musical public, but the taste of a handful of bureaucrats.
I see that former Velvet Underground drummer Moe Tucker was spotted at a Georgia Tea Party protest, telling a local reporter that she is “furious about the way we are being led towards socialism.” Prefix magazine calls this “depressing” news that will “bring you down” before the weekend, because it’s incumbent upon all musicians – especially those in seminal proto-punk bands like VU – to have roughly the same, boring lefty politics.
– Michael C. Moynihan, linked to and already picked out as a nice little nugget by Instapundit, which is where I saw it. I know, I know, who gives a defecation what ex-music-celebs think? Or for that matter current actors. Well, I like it when they talk sense, if only because the people who talk nonsense get so miserable and angry about it.
Yesterday, ah yesterday. All was happy anticipation then. Yesterday there was this article in the Guardian. It began,
There will be blood – watch exclusive of 10:10 campaign’s ‘No Pressure’ film
Here’s a highly explosive short film, written by Richard Curtis, from our friends at the 10:10 climate change campaign
and continued enthusiastically
Well, I’m certain you’ll agree that detonating school kids, footballers and movie stars into gory pulp for ignoring their carbon footprints is attention-grabbing. It’s also got a decent sprinkling of stardust – Peter Crouch, Gillian Anderson, Radiohead and others.
But it’s pretty edgy, given 10:10’s aim of asking people, businesses and organisations to take positive action against global warming by cutting their greenhouse gas emissions by 10% in a year, and thereby pressuring governments to act.
However today, the article has this added to it.
Sorry.
Today we put up a mini-movie about 10:10 and climate change called ‘No Pressure’.
With climate change becoming increasingly threatening, and decreasingly talked about in the media, we wanted to find a way to bring this critical issue back into the headlines whilst making people laugh. We were therefore delighted when Britain’s leading comedy writer, Richard Curtis – writer of Blackadder, Four Weddings, Notting Hill and many others – agreed to write a short film for the 10:10 campaign. Many people found the resulting film extremely funny, but unfortunately some didn’t and we sincerely apologise to anybody we have offended.
As a result of these concerns we’ve taken it off our website.
We’d like to thank the 50+ film professionals and 40+ actors and extras and who gave their time and equipment to the film for free. We greatly value your contributions and the tremendous enthusiasm and professionalism you brought to the project.
At 10:10 we’re all about trying new and creative ways of getting people to take action on climate change. Unfortunately in this instance we missed the mark. Oh well, we live and learn.
Onwards and upwards,
Eugenie, Franny, Daniel, Lizzie and the whole 10:10 team
Mr James Delingpole may have had something to do with this sad outcome. You can still see the film if you wish. It has been reposted on YouTube by gleeful anti-greenies. Both his article and the Guardian one I linked to earlier have links.
“Ireland’s membership of the euro was thus the single most important reason for yesterday eye-wateringly large bailout of the Irish banks, which will take the budget deficit to 32 per cent of GDP and its gross government debt to 96 per cent of GDP. The tragedy is that nobody is pointing this out: the political establishment is too closely implicated and may yet need to draw on a European bailout fund. Imagine what would have happened had Britain also embraced the single currency: our interest rates – which were substantially higher than the Eurozone’s, albeit still too low – would have stoked our own bubble to an even greater extent than anything managed by the Bank of England. The UK property bubble would have been even larger and its implosion even more devastating. We don’t realise it – but Britain’s bust of 2008-09 could easily have been much, much nastier.”
– Allister Heath.
It might be worth re-reading this to recall the ferocity of those pro-euro folk and their treatment of anyone who sought to stand in their way, including, it seems, ordinary voters.
“I don’t know what organically grown chickens are; I’ve never seen one.”
– Tony Curtis, one of the greats, who died this week.
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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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