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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From yesterday’s Telegraph comes this amazing story:
A 10-year-old girl saved her family and 100 other tourists from the Asian tsunami because she had learnt about the giant waves in a geography lesson, it has emerged.
Tilly Smith, from Oxshott, Surrey, was holidaying with her parents and seven-year-old sister on Maikhao beach in Phuket, Thailand, when the tide rushed out.
As the other tourists watched in amazement, the water began to bubble and the boats on the horizon started to violently bob up and down.
Tilly, who had studied tsunamis in a geography class two weeks earlier, quickly realised they were in danger.
She told her mother they had to get off the beach immediately and warned that it could be a tsunami.
She explained she had just completed a school project on the huge waves and said they were seeing the warning signs that a tsunami was minutes away.
Her parents alerted the other holidaymakers and staff at their hotel, which was quickly evacuated. The wave crashed a few minutes later, but no one on the beach was killed or seriously injured.
I missed this yesterday, but Norm Geras, linked to today by Instapundit because of another posting about Guardian foolishness, caught it, to whom thanks.
I am sure that some time during the last few months I have blogged things which have at least suggested that blogging etc. is capable of replacing the existing media. If so, apologies, and if not, lucky me. This tsunami disaster has made clear what has long been obvious, that the old media and the new media complement and feed into each other, or at any rate they ought to.
Bloggers in the right places at the right times can feed stories not just to other meta-bloggers, but to the mainstream media. A few of them were, after all, actually there. And then other bloggers, as I have just done, can point blog readers towards particularly choice mainstream media stories.
I particularly admire the way that the Guardian, for all that it is easy for the likes of us to criticise it for all kinds of other reasons, has at least learned how blogging can actually help in times like these, not just by telling the terrible story, but by helping to make it less terrible.
London celebrated the arrival of the New Year in what was under the circumstances rather too flamboyant style last night, with a firework display in, over and around the Wheel. The trouble with a firework display celebration at a time like this is that you can either do them, or cancel them. You cannot tone them down.
I have more photos of how this looked on my telly here.
Huge firework displays fit very snugly into the Way We Live Now, and in particular into the Way We Are Governed Now. More and more fireworks shows are now collectively staged, and collectively viewed, including on TV of course. Meanwhile, free enterprise firework enjoyment is discouraged, allegedly because of safety, but probably also simply because it is free enterprise.
I wonder if there is an EU dimension to this? There usually is, after all. The EU is all about centralised power and the suppression of freelance activity. It is also all mixed up with Roman Catholicism. As is November 5th, otherwise known as Bonfire Night or Guy Fawkes Night. Are our continental rulers now discouraging us from celebrating the burning of a Roman Catholic terrorist, who was, like them, hell bent on reversing the defeat of the Spanish Armada?
Whatever the reason, and however much I hate what the new arrangements may or may not symbolise, I prefer the new firework dispensation. I recall being in Germany over the New Year some time in the eighties, and seeing the entire sky of Germany lit up at midnight on the dot. I thought to myself, we should do that, instead of the sputtering, long -drawn-out, chaotic, dog-scaring mess that our November 5th celebrations have degenerated into. (This year’s, to my ears, were particularly feeble and pointless.) Having them all at one means that we can all enjoy them all at once, and then go back indoors and get stuck into the New Year. Which I hope is a happy one for all who read and write here.
None of which means that the inconsolable unhappinesses of many in the world just now, which for me have been most vividly and most gruesomely evoked by Amit Varma, should be ignored.
Who would have thought that the eastern coastal parts of India would, following the tsunami devastation, be afflicted by a shortage of kerosene, of all things and among many other things? Yet it is all perfectly logical. Burying the bodies is taking a long, long time, and by the time many are reached they have decayed and cannot be dragged. Grab hold of a leg, and you end up holding only a leg. Yet the bodies must be disposed of, to prevent disease. So, they must be burned. But for that you need… kerosene.
For the link to that piece I thank Instapundit, who I think has been outstanding in recent days, both with his abundant tsunami linkage � what is happening, what needs to be done, how to help, etc. – and for his abundant postings about and linkings to other matters. Update: as Instapundit again notes, there is now more Amit Varma reportage.
So a very unhappy New Year for many. If any of those reading this are personally afflicted in any way by these terrible events, please know that you have the deepest sympathy of all of us here and of all the other readers of this.
Dale Amon is Samizdata.net’s man in the know about this stuff, but I link to it also, if only because the enemies of freedom (see the first paragraph of the first comment on this posting) seem to hate it so much, and write attacks (“Among their sacred causes are the decontrol of gun ownership and decriminalisation of all drugs…”) on Samizdata.net that could not be bettered if Samidata.net had paid for them.
Like SpaceShipOne, the homebuilt rocketship that claimed a £5.2m cash prize for twice reaching suborbital space, Rutan’s next creation will travel beyond Earth’s atmosphere as well.
SpaceShipTwo (SS2), however, will have more than a single occupant.
Rutan is toying with designs to accommodate up to eight passengers at a time, with enough upgrades to warrant a ticket in the £104,000 (£200,000) price range.
“I think anyone who had the chance to go would want to go,” said Trevor Beattie, a British advertising personality, who already has booked a flight.
Rutan, who has been averaging better than one new aircraft design every year for the past three decades, says he is finished with airplanes for a while.
The mission now for his Mojave-based company, Scaled Composites, is to create 3,000 new astronauts a year – per departure point, Rutan adds, and per ship.
“Mojave is not going to be the only place in the world where there will be a place to buy tickets and fly a spaceflight,” Rutan said.
Not everything in the world is good just now, and that would have been true even without that terrible earthquake. But some things are going very well.
Carol and Peter Williams live in Alton, Hampshire, with their son, also called Peter, who is a chess champion. Which was how the trouble started. The Williams family is now locked in battle with their Local Education Authority (LEA) about whether Peter should be allowed to pursue his education at home, or should instead be forced to attend school.
I heard about this via Daryl Cobranchi (such are the ways of the Internet), and emailed first Daryl, and then Carol Williams, who emailed me thus this morning
I would not say that education (I hate that word) is the subject. It is about freedom of choice and the desire to encourage your children in the subjects they enjoy and/or are good at.
I will now give a potted history so you can see how we got where we are today with the LEA.
Peter started playing chess when he was 5 years old. The rapid progress he made showed us this was way above the expected level of the average 5 year old. When Peter became 6, for a period of around 6 months, he had one day a week off school to study chess more in depth. Every week we had to write a letter to the school asking permission for this, after this period we decided to request that this was made a permanent arrangement, this is where it all started to go wrong. The school granted us a maximum of 15 days per year, stating that Peters’ education would suffer otherwise. As he had just taken his SATS tests and achieve above average marks in all bar one subject, this argument did not hold water. We wrote back stating that this was not acceptable to us. We subsequently received a letter from the LEA’s Barrister stating that the offer had to be withdrawn as it was illegal to allow children time off from school. This is absolutely incorrect as Hampshire LEA’s website states that discretionary leave is entirely at the discretion of the Head . At this point we made the decision to withdraw Peter from state school and teach him at home. → Continue reading: Carol Williams on why she does not now want her son Peter to go to school
Personally I read the first Harry Potter, then started the second one and said: enough, I am too old for this. Nor are Harry Potter movies the kind of movies I now like and I have seen none of them. So, I am a Muggle and proud of it. But for all that, I am very impressed by this:
The sixth book in the hugely successful Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, is already among the bestsellers on the Internet more than six months before its publication.
US online retailer Amazon says advanced orders for the book, written by British author JK Rowling, have propelled it to number one on its list of 100 bestsellers.
It is the sheer economic scale of the phenomenon that I find so amazing. How many people, I wonder, now make a permanent living from the Harry Potter books, and associated industries?
This is the sixth book, and there is another one due, plus there have already been three movies, right? So, four more to come? And will they then just carry on making HP movies with their own made-up stories? It would make sense. (Not that the JK Rowling ones are un-made-up, but you get my point.)
It reminds me of an earlier British cultural export-stroke-industry, as I am surely not the first to have observed.
Seriously, there must be interesting parallels between the Harry Potter phenomenon and the James Bond phenomenon. Both use magical toys. Both battle against evil, set in architecturally impressive surroundings. Both were made into mega-successful movies. But, what do I know? Or care? I leave all that sort of chatter to those who have read it and seen it.
Of whom there are, as I say, quite a few.
Maybe, when JKR has ceased her labours and has simply parked herself in a deck chair under her personal banknote Niagara, I will even give the books another go myself.
Okay that was originally the end, but here is another thought. JK Rowling should build herself a gigantic castle, made of huge lumps of stone, with turrets and battlements and flying buttresses and bridges high up in the sky, like they used to build in Scotland and like Mad King Ludwig used to build in Bavaria. It really is about time the construction of places like that was resumed, and for real rather than just in Disneyworlds and such places. And she is just the woman to do it. God knows, she can afford it.
And here (just in case you missed the comments on the previous posting) is yet another circumstance where an armed populace would have really helped:
One man has died and five other people are in a critical condition after being attacked by a man with a knife.
Scotland Yard said a man drove around the areas between Enfield and Haringey in north London in a red Hyundai stabbing people on Thursday morning.
Officers are investigating if there is a link between the attacks and the murder of shopkeeper Mahmut Fahri.
A man, who police say has a history of mental illness, is being held in connection with the attacks.
“History of mental illness” is today’s euphemism for maniac, it would seem.
Personally I believe that people would not even think of behaving like this if they knew that everywhere they went on such rampages they would be confronted by the armed and the respectable. And I further believe (although I would welcome intelligent contradition about this) that this includes maniacs, who (and I believe there have been quite sophisticated experiments about this) are actually quite responsive and rational about altering how they conduct themselves, when faced with predictably different rewards and predictably different punishments. What maniacs lack is not rationality; it is merely any semblance of good manners.
See also: Hungerford Massacre. This slaughter was caused by gun control. It was not only caused by gun control, but it could not possibly have occurred in the way that it did without gun control. The police had to get guns from London. And it all happened at the precise historical moment when, for the first time since cheap firearms were invented, a country town like Hungerford no longer contained any. Simultaneously, crime throughout the British countryside was rocketing. The response to Hungerford was to tighten the screw that had illegalised self-defence in the first place.
This good woman has already been linked to from here today, but there cannot be too many such links out here in Blogland, I say.
I know that, for some, the way we here at Samizdata.net keep banging on, so to speak, about gun control (iniquity and fatuity of) is a bit dreary and predictable. But there is actually a bit of a buzz in Britain now about this issue, and any decade now this country might see some big changes in the right direction. Provided we keep buzzing and banging on.
Today, while wandering along beside the Thames, I came across a plaque, which said the following:
LIEUTENANT COLONEL JOHN BY, ROYAL ENGINEERS
FOUNDER OF OTTAWA, CAPITAL OF CANADA
John By was born near this place and baptised in the church of St. Mary-at-Lambeth, August 10, 1779. After a distinguished career in Canada and in the Peninsular War, he was called out of retirement in 1826 and sent to Canada to build the Rideau Canal waterway. A defence project, the waterway would extend 200 kilometres from the Ottawa River to Lake Ontario. It penetrated uncharted lakes and rivers, virgin forest, rock, and swamp attended by the horrors of introduced malaria. This outstanding engineering feat, which required the construction of 47 stone masonry locks and 23 dams, was opened May 30, 1832. Now a heritage treasure, it remains in use as a recreational waterway.
John By retired to Frant, East Sussex, where he died February 1, 1836.
Erected 1997 by The Historical Society of Ottawa.
You learn something new every day, if you keep your eyes open and your brain open.
A camera helps too. Photographs of where I was in London, and of the plaque itself, and further linkage, here.
The England cricket team is doing really rather well just now. They are not the best. Australia are the best. But England are well on the way to establishing themselves as the best of the rest. Yesterday they completed a fine victory against South Africa, in the first of the series of five test matches they are playing down there, having earlier in the year, in England, beaten New Zealand in 3 games out of 3 and the West Indies in 4 games out of 4. Before that they toured the West Indies and beat them 3 games out of 4, with the last game drawn. In other words, England have won 8 out of their last 8 test matches (more than any England side has ever won consecutively before), and it would have 12 out of 12 had it not been for that final game draw in the West Indies. Recent England recruit Andrew Strauss, who batted superbly, both in the game against South Africa that finished yesterday morning and throughout last summer, has now played in just 8 test matches and has been on the winning side every time. This is amazing.
All of which means that, what with England doing so well, now was a very good time for the England cricket authorities to be renegotiating the TV rights to cricket matches, and here is what they have done:
Live coverage of England’s home Test matches will no longer be available on terrestrial TV from 2006 onwards.
The England and Wales Cricket Board has awarded an exclusive four-year contract to BSkyB, which will run until 2009.
In other words, I and millions of other BBC License Fee payers will not be able to watch test cricket live on the telly without paying extra. → Continue reading: Who owns English cricket?
On Saturday, there was this, from Helen Szamuely …
The most recent news from Russia, apart from the ongoing saga of Yukos, which is being destroyed by the government partly to punish its Chairman, Khodorkovsky, for trying to break away from it and for giving money to the political opposition and partly to restore control of the production of energy to the state, has been one of a new law presented to the Lower House of the Duma. This will specify that foreigners who can be shown to have criticized Russia, its people and its culture, which, one must assume, includes the political structure, can be refused a visa without further ado.
One has to accept that a country must be able to choose whether to allow certain people to enter its territory. However, Russia until recently has proclaimed its intention to become an open country like other open countries (give or take complete state control of the media and the abolition of elections on regional level and of individual deputies of the Duma). If this law goes through, all pretence will be finally abandoned.
… and then yesterday, this, from Freedom House (thank you Instapundit):
Political rights and civil liberties have become so restricted in Russia that the country has been downgraded to “Not Free,” Freedom House announced in a major survey of global freedom released today.
Mark me down as a foreigner who can be shown to have criticized Russia, by which I mean the bit of Russia (the bit in charge) that did this to the rest of Russia.
Next time I’m at a party and I meet someone who works for a publishing company, I’m going to get him in a headlock and push his face into a cake.
– Some consumer feedback from Harry Hutton – something about British books being made with the wrong sort of paper.
You get used to your favourite sort of coffee, and I have now become completely used to my favourite brand: Nescafé Gold Blend. Nescafé is, so they claim, the biggest selling instant coffee in the world.
Originally I started buying Nescafé Gold Blend because I had been told by my television that it would cause a very attractive young actress called Fiona Fullerton to become friendly with me, but now I buy it because I like it.
However, I have a serious complaint to make about the size of Nescafé jars. There is a lot of talk out there in Internetland and Blogland about how market researchers are trawling the blogs to find out, on behalf of the business enterprises who hire them, what the masses think of the latest products of these business enterprises. Well, let the Nescafé market researchers trawl this.
I have no problem with the coffee itself. It is the jars that concern me.
There is much about Nescafé Gold Blend jars that I like a lot, quite aside from liking their contents. They are very fine in their own right, both aesthetically and structurally. When people first emerged from the Communist Yoke into the Light of Capitalism, they found themselves confronted with packages and pots and containers containing branded Capitalist products that were so beautiful (the packages and pots and containers I mean) that they could hardly bear to throw them away. These Nescafé jars were an excellent embodiment of this dilemma. When archaeologists dig up something like these jars made by ancient Romans or Greeks or Etruscans they celebrate for a century and build entire new museums to accommodate these items and all their worshippers. Yet we Westerners just chuck them out with the rest of the rubbish.
And I do too, for reasons I will get to, but first let me explain what I like – or would like – to do with these jars. I like (and would like) to use them for shelving. Thus:
When I die, I expect all my various Internet scribblings to be forgotten utterly, very quickly, and that the last thing about me that anyone will really remember will be my kitchen, with all its CDs, and the fact that many of the shelves (for CDs and for general crap) involved Nescafé jars. → Continue reading: Nescafé jars are the wrong size!
I have not read Michael Crichton’s latest novel, State of Fear, but I have just read this review of it, which I found via Arts & Letters Daily. It is a story with heroes and with villains, but here is the twist:
We soon learn that such skulduggery is being coordinated, or so it seems, by Nick Drake, a Ralph Nader clone – intense, single-minded and (apologies to Mr. Nader’s many fans) unhinged. He is president of the National Environmental Resource Fund (NERF), an organization founded by lawyers, not scientists, and devoted to pushing a radical environmental agenda. The fund is clearly modeled on the real-life Natural Resources Defense Council, whose annual budget is about the same: $44 million.
To keep the donations rolling in, Drake is trying to induce a perpetual state of fear in the public by marketing the hell out of predictions of catastrophic global warming. Global warming – as we are all too well aware these days – results from burning fossil fuels that load the atmosphere with heat-trapping carbon dioxide. Drake’s problem is that people just aren’t alarmed enough to send in those vital checks. But Drake has a plan; he’ll force nature to cooperate with him.
To get his plan rolling, Drake needs seed money, so he wheedles millionaire playboy George Morton, heir to a forklift fortune, into donating $10 million to NERF. But Morton has the audacity to withdraw his gift when a scientist at MIT apparently sets him straight about the science behind Drake’s claims. Drake is livid. Shortly after Morton takes his money back, he crashes his Ferrari through an oceanside guard rail and plunges down a cliff to his presumed death. No body is found. Is this an accident or yet another murder?
It will be extremely interesting to watch what happens to this book. Will it be picked up and run with by anti-environmentalist types like me? Well, here I am doing my bit for that process. Will this book perhaps be made into a movie? More generally, will the idea which it embodies, that greenery can be combined with villainy, be echoed in other stories, including the stories that emerge from Hollywood?
Hollywood has to have villains, and I have been willing to accept that the profusion of environment-destroying capitalist in the movies in recent years is caused at least partly by the fact that to get drama you need bad guys, and, well, environment good, people harming it bad, right?
And if you do not have a human villain, then you must have an inhuman force for the heroes to battle against, such as: environmental disaster.
But now that Crichton has explained – and in a best seller type book that will be sold in airports, that there can also be enviro-villains, and that environmental disasters might be lies told by enviro-villains, then we ought in due course to be seeing at least some Hollywood heavies who are decked out in green plumage. And it might well happen. All I am saying is: let us keep our eyes and ears open, and track this story as it unfolds.
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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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