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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Yesterday President Chirac proudly opened the Millau Viaduct, to universal acclaim, not just in France, but from anyone in the world who has seen any of the photos.
It is a truly magnificent structure. Yesterday I foolishly speculated that they might have saved billions had they been been willing to build something smaller and wigglier, but since this bridge in fact only cost an amazing €394 million that is flat wrong. And what is more, the entire cost of the bridge was paid by a private company, the same one that built the Eiffel Tower.
This bridge gives the world perhaps its biggest and juiciest taste so far of just what a huge impact on road transport the era of road pricing, now getting seriously underway, is destined to have. At first, environmentalists favoured road pricing, because they thought it would discourage cars. Alas for vain hopes. Road pricing make it possible for the private sector to build more and more magnificent roads. This bridge could never have been contemplated, let alone built, had the French not long been in the habit of paying to use their fastest roads.
It also illustrates perfectly just how amazingly bridge technology has progressed in recent years. The French had long known that they needed this bridge, and that it needed to be this high and this direct. It was just that until now, bridge technology did not permit its construction. And then … it did! With truly wonderful results.
The only tiny doubt concerns the fact that the architect (whatever exactly that means of what is essentially an engineering triumph) is the same architect as presided over the construction of the (aesthetically very pleasing) Millenium footbridge, in London. That famously wobbled when it was first opened. This was quickly fixed of course, and it was only a wobble, not a catastrophe. But I bet when that happened, the clients for this new whopper felt a teeny bit of a wobble themselves. I so assume, however, that all is completely well structurally with the new bridge.
The Internet is now quite properly awash with imagery of this masterpiece, and I have linked to many such views. In addition to all the regular pictures, I particularly like this one.
In April of this year, I did a White Rose posting, linking to this BBC report about people who are wrongly accused by the Criminal Records Bureau of being criminals. Because I wrote the piece, I today received email notification of this comment on it, that has just been added by David Wilson. This comment deserves wider circulation than just to sit in the White Rose archives. The message is, if you have a quite common name, like David Wilson, look out.
Just found your page and I have experienced this mistaken identity by the National Identification Service (NIS) and been wrongly identified with a convicted criminal with a similar name and date of birth – but absolutely no other similarities.
I am trying to emigrate and was shocked when the report from the NIS came about a man who was convicted of fraud, serious assault and most distressing sexual assault!
I found all doors for complaint closed to me. I called the NIS and was told by an ignorant person on the phone ‘that’s your problem and it’s up to you to prove otherwise’. The Police where equally difficult to deal with. No lawyer would touch it.
I then took it to my MP Mr James Wray, who wrote to Blunkett, who passed it to the Minister Bob Ainsworth, who then wrote to my MP, assuring him that it wouldn’t happen again. I then received a corrected document which stated I had no offences, and an apology for the error.
That wasn’t the end of it though. On July 25th of this year I was stopped in a US Airport (after trying to collect an eticket from BA check-in, who instead of giving me a ticket held on to my passport and alerted and armed security guard) and prevented from boarding my flight to Gatwick for over an hour. A manager finally came and told me it was an issue between myself and my government, and let me board the plane.
On arriving back in the UK I wrote to the NIS asking for justification of why my name is still being linked to this other person, and recorded proof of posting of my letter – Royal Mail tell me it was received on 30th July 2004. I never received any response. It was quite simply ignored. Today I believe there has been no change despite the intervention of Mr. Ainsworth.
Once again I find myself needing to get a copy of this sheet and just today had a letter sent to me asking me several questions which relate to the other man. I have been told by someone in the legal profession that it is a ‘violation of my rights to privacy by government’ and that I could in fact have a legal case.
Any advice would be appreciated. Right now I would just like to be at my liberty and enjoy my freedom to travel in the world without harassment or any violation of my civil liberties.
I am an honest person who has never been charged with any offence. The PNC and the actions of the NIS is an absolute disgrace – it would seem that a civil servant in London has more power than any Judge or Jury in the nation and has the ability to put one person’s criminal past on another. There is I have found no way to completely clear your name.
Last night I attended a fascinating talk about the libertarian movement in Spain, hosted by Tim Evans in Putney, and given by Gabriel Calzada, who had been known to me before last night only as the author (maybe – I was unsure) of this essay.
The message Gabriel delivered to a small but very attentive group of London libertarians can be briefly summarised as follows: the Spanish libertarian movement is extraordinarily big and is doing extraordinarily well.
Gabriel started his talk with some history, concerning the Salamanca school of Natural Law theorists, mentioning the names of Francisco de Vitoria, Francisco de Suarez, and Juan de Mariana. Here is a famous Mariana quote:
Taxes are commonly a calamity for the people and a nightmare for the government. For the former they are always excessive; for the latter they are never enough, never too much.
But that was a very long time ago, and that kind of thing only influenced modern Spain indirectly, via its influence on the Austrian school.
It became very clear as the evening went on that the enormous Spanish anarchist movement that flourished about a century ago is crucial to any understanding of the current Spanish libertarian movement. Anarchism as a political force in Spain was eventually decapitated by the supposed allies of the anarchists, the Communists, for being insufficiently obedient to Stalin, but the climate of opinion – what we here at Samizdata call the meta-context – of anarchism lived on in Spain. Whereas the typical political question in other countries is something like: How shall we govern ourselves?, in Spain the question is: How shall we be free? How, as it were, do you do freedom? With a question like that, it makes sense that the libertarian answer to that question (one word summary: property) would attract a mountain of enthusiastic attention, and it has.
Perhaps another reason for the dramatic impact of libertarianism in Spain is that Spain has, until challenged by the libertarians, been intellectually dominated by Communism. Anarchism having been wiped out, and anti-Communism having become so tainted by Francoism, that left the lefties ruling the media roost in Spain, in the form of such mass media giants as El Pais, the biggest national newspaper in Spain, which makes the Guardian seem to Gabriel like a centrist/liberal kitten by comparison. Lots of libertarians are converts from leftism, and Spain is very full of people who have been raised in a leftist manner but who are looking for different answers.
It may also have helped the rise of libertarianism, although this was not mentioned by Gabriel or in discussion, that Spain is now economically so vibrant, compared to earlier times.
Gabriel, interestingly, preferred to focus on the achievements of two individuals: Jesus Huerta de Soto, and Federico Jimenez Losantos. Huerta is the key scholar, and Jimenez is a key media performer, and both are men of “contageous enthusiasm”, a phrase Gabriel used several times.
He also mentioned the vital role that the Internet has played in this story. Again, summarising brutally, whereas the Communists owned the old media, the libertarians own the Internet, to the point where the Communists are getting seriously worried.
Gabriel mentioned two internet sites in particular, liberalismo.org (scholarship) and Libertad Digital (current affairs). Both have astronomical hit rates, of the order of a million a month (sorry but I am bad at numbers). When those Communists type any Spanish ‘issue’ into their search engines, time and time again, the first few hits are libertarian analyses. No wonder they are so anxious, and have been saying that something ought to be done about controlling the Internet.
Jimenez is also doing extraordinarily well on the radio.
I could attempt to go on, on the basis of my scribbled and inadequate notes, but I will leave it at that for now, hoping that Gabriel will regard this report as better than nothing. (Antoine Clarke, also present, might like to comment about all the things I missed, and maybe clarify some of the numbers involved in this story, people, hit rates, etc.) I will add only that whereas there are now no Spanish libertarian sites which also present themselves to the English speaking world in English, this is apparently about to change. There will soon be an English language site devoted to Spanish affairs, written by Spanish libertarians. Gabriel has promised to inform us as soon as it gets going.
Altogether a fascinating, and most encouraging evening.
Afterwards we had a late supper at Tim and Helen’s, which is where I took this photo of Gabriel.
Hayek (on the left in black and white) is saying: what is that greenery doing in front of me? Gabriel is a great enemy of greenery, having recently penned a denunciation of the Kyoto Treaty, so particular apologies for that blemish.
Oh, and did I mention that Gabriel Calzada has also just been made a Professor at the University of Madrid?
If ideas have consequences, and they definitely do, then Spanish libertarianism is going to have some very big consequences indeed.
Fritz Werner is my all time favourite conductor of Bach choral music, bar none, and yesterday I got this CD set of (get this): the St John Passion, the St Matthew Passion, the Christmas Oratorio, the B Minor Mass, plus a Motet, plus a Cantata (the one with Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring). Ten brand new CDs for £22 the lot.
Is capitalism great or what? � asks JP in the previous post. I reply that capitalism is definitely not in the Or What? category. (Trivia digression: In what movie did actor Clu Gulager say that he was in the Or What? category?)
People who say that money cannot buy happiness are just no good at shopping.
There are two big China stories doing the rounds today. In no particular order, there is the one about IBM selling its personal computer operation to a Chinese corporation, and there is the one about how the EU is planning to end its arms embargo on China.
Concerning the ending of the EU arms embargo, the EU Referendum blog (linking to this Times Online story today) has this to say:
As we have pointed out many times on this Blog (see for instance, here),the embargo has become one of the most sensitive geo-political issues, with the United States worried that its European allies will be arming a country that it sees as a potential military rival.
And, as we have also reported, China is spending billions of dollars upgrading its military capability and is rapidly becoming an economic superpower. Now The Times notes that Washington is concerned that East Asia remains militarily unstable, with China threatening Taiwan and North Korea threatening South Korea.
The US is worried that Europe will sell China advanced technology, such as over-the-horizon-targeting systems (guided by Galileo GPS signals) that would enable the Chinese military to strike American ships hundreds of miles out in the Pacific.
The Times also notes that Congress already is planning legislation that would ban the Pentagon from trading with any country that makes military sales to China and, as we have observed (here) is already making technology transfers difficult.
At the moment, the War on Terror is going well in this sense, that no mega-horror stories of the sort feared immediately after 9/11 have actually materialised. (Whether that is because the War on Terror has been conducted from our side with dazzling brilliance, or because it was superfluous, I leave the reader to decide. A bit of both would be my guess.) There have been some horrible killings, but no mega-death bomb explosions or plagues of the kind that we all have feared. Which means, unless the Islamofascists prove to have more life (by which I mean death) in them than now seems likely, that the world, and the people of the USA in particular, now have some attention to spare for what is surely going to be the big confrontation of the next few years, namely the rivalry for the global number one spot between the USA and China. China now has semi-sane economic policies, and a billion odd people semi-thriving under them. And America is … America. Quite a confrontation, I am sure we would all agree.
No doubt the EUrocrats will argue, if they have not started arguing already, that this IBM deal proves what hypocrites those silly Americans are for fussing about them doing business with the Chinese too. But cheap computers that China already perfectly well knows how to make are one thing; such things as hi-tech guidance systems for Chinese rockets are quite another.
Maybe this will be the moment when Americans finally decide in large numbers what an anti-American operation the EU is – as opposed to just a bunch of loser countries that count for nothing, whether they get together or whether they stay separate. Time was when the USA saw the EU as a bastion against the USSR. But imagine what Americans will make of people whom they regard as helping their enemies. What a change it would make (is making?) if everyday Americans were to take against (are taking against) the EU, and decide that they would like it, shall we say, crumbled.
Unless, of course, the EU is just dangling the ending of the arms embargo in front of everybody, prior to doing a deal with the USA that will leave everyone smiling and shaking hands, and the EU (having agreed to perpetuate the arms embargo indefinitely) suddenly being the USA’s good buddy again.
As a libertarian, I expect to be told (again) by other libertarians that I am not a libertarian, this time for not condeming all embargoes absolutely, regardless of who against and of what. Which I can live with. I might even be persuaded that the world would be improved if the Chinese government could now buy all the weapons it wanted from anyone it wanted. I doubt it, but give it a try if you want to. But one thing I do know. I absolutely do not want to find myself a citizen of a nation state (EUrope) which the USA decides is its enemy. Whatever ends up happening with this embargo, today I felt that possibility move a little closer.
I have just begun reading Niall Ferguson’s Empire: How Britain Made The Modern Word, and I know that it will be a finisher, so to speak. Here is his description of how the British Empire got started:
In December 1663 a Welshman called Henry Morgan sailed five hundred miles across the Caribbean to mount a spectacular raid on a Spanish outpost called Gran Grenada, to the north of Lago de Nicaragua. The aim of the expedition was simple: to find and steal Spanish gold – or any other movable property. When Morgan and his men got to Gran Grenada, as the Governor of Jamaica reported in a despatch to London, ‘[They] fired a volley, overturned eighteen great guns . . . took the serjeant-major’s house wherein were all their arms and ammunition, secured in the great Church 300 of the best men prisoners . . . plundered for 16 hours, discharged the prisoners, sunk all the boats and so came away.’ It was the beginning of one of the seventeenth century’s most extraordinary smash-and-grab sprees.
It should never be forgotten that this was how the British Empire began: in a maelstrom of seaborne violence and theft. It was not conceived by self-conscious imperialists, aiming to establish English rule over foreign lands, or colonists hoping to build a new life overseas. Morgan and his fellow ‘buccaneers’ were thieves, trying to steal the proceeds of someone else’s Empire.
The buccaneers called themselves the ‘Brethren of the Coast’ and had a complex system of profit-sharing, including insurance policies for injury. Essentially, however, they were engaged in organized crime. When Morgan led another raid against the Spanish town of Portobelo in Panama, in 1668, he came back with so much plunder – in all, a quarter of a million pieces of eight – that the coins became legal tender in Jamaica. That amounted to £60,000 from just one raid. The English government not only winked at Morgan’s activity; it positively encouraged him. Viewed from London, buccaneering was a low-budget way of waging war against England’s principal European foe, Spain. In effect, the Crown licensed the pirates as ‘privateers’, legalizing their operations in return for a share of the proceeds. Morgan’s career was a classic example of the way the British Empire started out, using enterprising freelances as much as official forces.
For a more respectful, and proudly Welsh, view of Morgan’s place in history, try this. And see also this posting here, early last year, about the TV show Ferguson did after writing his book.
Two years ago a South Korean woman reportedly asked a North Korean why President Kim Jong Il was the only fat man in the country, and was detained for several days as a result.
– from a Christian Science Monitor report about a small tourist enclave in North Korea, run by the Hyundai Coporation of South Korea and visited mainly by South Koreans.
I was trawling through an ancient b3ta.com newsletter, as you do, earlier in the week, and came across these profundities. But since the profundities concern cats, I saved them until today, Friday being catblogging day, or so I seem to recall reading somewhere. Anyway, this is what b3ta.com says, so profoundly:
We can’t imagine anything worse than being allergic to cats – it’d be like having an allergy to life itself. However, help is at hand for sufferers. Boffins are busy meddling with nature to create a moggy that won’t provoke an allergic reaction, and the first kittens are due in 2007. A snip at just $3500. BTW: When people claim they’re allergic to cat fur, what they mean is that they’re allergic to cat urine, cat skin or cat saliva that’s become airborne by being secreted on the fur.
And b3ta.com then supply this link to allerca. Says allerca at the top of its website:
WELCOME TO ALLERCA. ALLERCA is working to produce the world’s first hypoallergenic cats. These cats will allow some of the millions of people allergic to cats to enjoy the love and companionship of a household pet without suffering from allergy symptoms.
If you obsess only about the doings of politicians, you are liable to miss good news stories like that. Name me one politician who ever did anything as splendid as inventing a non-allergic-type cat. Actually, do not name any such politicians, because there may have been one or two. But you get my point.
Boffins meddling with nature, enough to make you purr, eh? Remind me to return to this topic in 2007, because strictly speaking it has not yet been done.
My apologies to all those readers of samizdata.net who are allergic to catblogging. Also, it seems that I am about six weeks late with this happy announcement. But, it is the kind of thing you can miss, so never mind about that.
Instapundit supplies two interesting (at first I thought that was about bloggers deep under the earth) recent links (among the usual zillion other interesting links), which in their different ways both illustrate how difficult it is being a Big Business person these days.
The first is to this Wall Street Journal piece, about how big business is now using the buzz on the Internet, blogs, etc., to find out what people really thing of their latest products.
People who rave online about their favorite new gadget – or gripe about the products they hate – are turning heads in the business world.
The growing popularity of blogs and other online forums has prompted companies to pay more attention to what is being said about them on the Internet, and has given rise to a new kind of market research aimed at finding useful information in the sea of online chatter.
For more than a year, car-maker Volkswagen AG has used a service by Techdirt, Foster City, Calif., to find out which new technologies are generating the most buzz online, with the aim of integrating some of them in new automobiles. “I think [Web sites] are very important as a source of unfiltered information, but there’s too much information out there already. Frankly, we don’t have time to keep track of all these things,” says Daniel Rosario, a senior engineer in Volkswagen’s electronics research lab in Silicon Valley.
There is no link to Techdirt in the piece, but presumably they mean these guys. → Continue reading: Buzz
I am confused (as Americans often say when they are about to be nasty in a very unconfused way – but I really am rather confused) by this BBC report about a scheme to make spammers wish that their parents had been further into birth control than they were, at about the time when they, the spammers, were actually born.
Here is the first paragraph:
A plan to bump up the bandwidth bills of spammers seems to be getting out of control.
But from what I can grasp of the rest of the article, what the BBC calls “getting out of control” is what the rest of use would describe as “working extremely well”.
Earlier this week Lycos Europe released a screensaver that bombards spam websites with data to try to increase the cost of running such sites.
But…
…which seems an odd word to use here. I would have gone with “And”…
…analysis shows that, in some cases, spam websites are being completely overwhelmed by the traffic being directed their way.
As that Sergeant Major (played by Windsor Davies) in It Ain’t Half Hot Mum used to say; “Oh dear. How tragic.”
But monitoring firm Netcraft has analysed response times for three of the sites the screensaver targets and has found that the campaign is being too successful.
What was that? Too successful?
Two of the sites being bombarded by data have been completely knocked offline. One other site has been responding to requests only intermittently as it struggles to cope with the traffic the screensaver is pointing its way.
Too successful. Too successful!!! Sounds like for once the punishment has fitted the crime perfectly.
But yes.
The campaign has come under fire from some corners of the web.
Many discussion groups have said that it set a dangerous precedent and could incite vigilantism.
“If you do manage to swamp the spammers then you set yourself up for more attacks in return,” said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at anti-virus firm Sophos.
Which, I suppose, would make this Cluley man a Sophist, twice over. This is like saying that if you use force against a burglar, he might get angry and burgle you even more ferociously in the future. As he might, I suppose. Best roll over and surrender. But I reckon that Cluley does not understand economics. I mean, if you were a spamster, would you make a point of picking a fight with people clever enough to have swamped your entire site?
This corner of the web (the corner that consists of me) is extremely attracted by the whole idea of what Lycos is doing here, and wonders what the downside of it is, if any. This corner of the web is in favour of what other corners of the web call “vigilantism”. To this corner of the web, this all sounds absolutely splendid.
But is this corner of the web missing something? What does this discussion group think?
The only real problem in what Lycos is doing seems, to this corner of the web, to be that the state, in all its various geographical manifestations, is minded to make it illegal. What is that thing that Perry keeps saying?
But so what? Even if this process is declared illegal, something resembling it could still proceed, could it not? If enough people wanted that? No? But at this point I really am rather confused.
Time for some good news, in the form of a classic piece of techno-ingenuity that looks like turning a classic problem into a classic solution.
You know how, when you take photos with your cheap digital camera (everyone has cheap digital cameras nowadays), and when you use flash (everyone uses flash), you get that horrible dark shadow behind and to one side (depending on exactly where the flash thingy is situated next to the camera lens). A problem, right? I think so. When I take digital photos, I am prepared to endure agonies of bad lighting and blurriness rather than resort to flash and its pictorial indignities.
But this guy has turned this problem into a solution. Solid shapes give you annoying little black lines do they? So why not, he said to himself, have four flash guns, all around the lens, not just one, and that way, get yourself black lines everywhere, wherever anything sticks out?
The multi-flash camera captures real life images and renders them in a non-photorealistic line-form. …
So what use is that? A lot, it turns out.
The multi-flash camera’s non-photorealistic images look like line drawings, but have an advantage over hand made line drawings for they are able [to] depict real-world scenes with precision and, most importanly, speed impossible for the human eye/hand. …
Think of all those instructions manuals where, in order to explain things properly, they cannot use photos, because photos are not clear enough, and must instead resort to laboriously created line drawings. Well, this gadget creates line drawings like that automatically.
Multi-flash imaging promises to facilitate and pioneer complicated rendering of mechanical objects, plants, or internal anatomical parts. Because of its ability to detect depth discontinuities, it may render shapes that would otherwise be difficult to perceive. For instance, a car engine could easily be captured in a non-photorealistic image and then superimposed over an actual photograph of the engine resulting in a superior manual illustration (see example below). Alternatively, a skeleton with complex network of white bones could be efficiently reproduced for instructional medical visualization. Additionally, an endoscopic camera enhanced with the multi-flash technology promises to enhance internal anatomical visualization for researchers and medical doctors.
I wonder if the kind of cheap digital cameras you can now buy for $200 will soon have this kind of facility. Personally, I look forward to a time when cheap digital cameras have far more, and more flexible, flash devices on them than they have now. My first digital camera had only one flash device of course, but it was such that I could take pictures from one direction and point the flash at the object of my attentions from a quite different direction. Too bad it never worked properly. You can get flash devices for a digital camera like this now, but they cost far more than I care to pay. If this new device draws attention to the good things that digital flash can do, that might change.
Which is all rather incidental. My main point here is: what a brilliant idea.
UPDATE: By the way, as a commenter reminded me by asking about this, I should have said that this camera is a whole lot better than anything Photoshop can do along these … lines! (Ha!) Follow the second link above, scroll down a bit, and you come to a set of six pictures. These show this difference very clearly, and it is all the difference.
What she said.
What she (the Telegraph‘s Janet Daley) started by saying was what they did in New York to bash the crime numbers down to a state bordering on civilisation from a state not bordering on barbarism. And then she turns her attention to the very contrasting state of affairs that still pertains in London, as we here hardly need reminding.
You will have noticed that this is precisely the opposite of what is happening here. Try ringing the police to tell them about an act of vandalism that is going on before your eyes and you will be treated with scarcely concealed ridicule: we’ve got more important things to worry about than some kids smashing up a building site. Never mind that the kids who have got away with that are likely to conclude that they can get away with pretty much anything.
Now New Yorkers have their city back and we are losing ours. …
I have a suggestion.
The politicos are cranking up this London Olympic bid. Well, all those of us who care more about people getting murdered than we do about people running marathons should offer the Olympiacs a deal. You can have your damned games if, by the time they come here, you have got on top of London’s crime numbers. If, on the other hand, you obsess about the Olympics and regard harping on about murder as a mere distraction, then we should all flood the internet with “London: World Capital of Crime – Olympians Do Not Come Here – You Will All Be Murdered” propaganda. “London Welcomes The Olympians” – “Now Hand Over Your Wallet Or Die”, etc.
Could some computer graphics genius perhaps do something with those Olympic ring things to turn them into a piece of anti-crime anti-the-political-causes-of-crime propaganda? Slosh some blood on them, perhaps, or make a couple of the rings into the front end of a double-barrelled shotgun.
The good thing about this arrangement is that I believe that it would work spontaneously. No one would have to be in charge of anything. But, if any of the people who do think that they are in charge of the Olympic bid tell us that we are being unpatriotic if we go on about crime in London instead of ignoring it and suffering in silence, they will be spontaneously attacked, and in a way that will really hurt them, with globally circulated (especially in Paris of course) bad news about what an appallingly unsuitable city London would be to hold these stupid games. Shut up, they will say. And the reply will be: no. Either you help us, or we screw you. That will be our message to them. And I think, after they have had a taste of it, that it might prove rather persuasive.
Which means that it is possible is that the Olympiacs might actually be recruited as allies in the campaign sketched out so vigorously by Janet Daley. Which means that something along the lines she says might – quite soon actually – start being done.
If London did do a New York with its criminal arrangements, as a result of the Olympics coming here, I for one could easily put up with a few weeks of Olympiac madness.
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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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