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]
|
From yesterday’s Guardian.
The creation of spin-off companies by university researchers, one of the chancellor’s key policies, has ground to a halt because of a catch-22 in tax legislation, say frustrated academics.
Gordon Brown, who today hosted a seminar on science and wealth creation at 11 Downing Street, has been alerted to the problem, but has so far failed to sort out the muddle over the aptly named Schedule 22.
Plans for scores of companies to work on developing science and research projects have been put on hold by universities after they learned that their academics were threatened with multimillion pound tax demands as soon as the companies started operating, long before they made any profits.
To add insult to injury, the universities themselves are responsible for collecting the tax from their enterprising academics.
University business development officers believe that spin-offs have almost ground to a halt and fear that delays will be damaging to many ideas and projects.
This arose because of one of those tax loopholes that our Chancellor so loves to close. → Continue reading: Schedule 22
The Mesopotamian writes about the US Presidential Election. This quote is also quoted by Alice in Texas (also of Samizdata). It is, you might say, another letter to voters in America (see immediately below)..
So, I have been, personally very attentive to the debates and positions of both candidates, and I have some thoughts which I would like to share with you, my American friends. To start with, Senator Kerry may be a very good man and quite patriotic. Also we have to respect the almost 50% of the American people who lean towards the democrats. I don’t know much about domestic issues in the States so naturally, as might be expected, the position of any Iraqi would be mainly influenced by the issue that most concerns him. Thus, regardless of all the arguments of both candidates the main problem is that President Bush now represents a symbol of defiance against the terrorists and it is a fact, that all the enemies of America, with the terrorists foremost, are hoping for him to be deposed in the upcoming elections. That is not to say that they like the democrats, but that they will take such an outcome as retreat by the American people, and will consequently be greatly encouraged to intensify their assault. The outcome here on the ground in Iraq seems to be almost obvious. In case President Bush loses the election there would be a massive upsurge of violence, in the belief, rightly or wrongly, by the enemy, that the new leadership is more likely to “cut and run” to use the phrase frequently used by some of my readers. And they would try to inflict as heavy casualties as possible on the American forces to bring about a retreat and withdrawal. It is crucial for them to remove this insurmountable obstacle which stands in their way. They fully realize that with continued American and allies’ commitment, they have no hope of achieving anything.
On the other hand if President Bush is reelected, this will prove to them that the American people are not intimidated despite all their brutality, and that their cause is quite futile. Yes there is little doubt that an election victory by President Bush would be a severe blow and a great disappointment for all the terrorists in the World and all the enemies of America.
Last night I attended a seminar on education organised by the Social Affairs Unit (there is as yet nothing about this event on their blog), at which the speaker was Francis Gilbert. Gilbert read a bit from his new book, I’m a Teacher, Get Me Out Of Here!, and if this bit was anything to go by, it is a very good book. (See also this posting here earlier this year.)
I will not here recount – and could not hope to recount – everything that was talked about, but I do note with approval that Francis Gilbert, after he had finished reading from his book, invited us to think about how much better education would be if it was run by the man who has recently taken over his local corner shop, and has made a great success of it, and by a few thousand others like him, instead of by the Government.
However, I will focus on one very widespread and wrong clutch of related ideas that cropped up in the course of our discussion. It was said, echoing something that Francis Gilbert himself had said, that education is not “like oil or bread”. The most important qualities of education are beyond measurement or quantification. The thing is just too complicated and … I think that the word ineffable may even have been used. Unlike oil or bread.
The conclusion we were invited to draw from this was that education, unlike oil or bread, cannot be supplied entirely by the free market, as a lot of us, taking our lead from Francis Gilbert, were enthusiastically recommending. It is just too complicated a thing to dole out in easily measurable little packets, like oil or bread.
But it simply does not follow that because something is complicated and immeasurable, even ineffable, that it cannot and should not be supplied by tradesmen. → Continue reading: The false argument for state control from immeasurability
In today’s Telegraph, there is a story about Yusuf Islam, the former Cat Stevens, all about how very strange and mysterious and unfair it was for him to be refused entry into the USA.
A spokesman for the US Department for Homeland Security said that Islam had been placed on a “watch list”, compiled to combat terrorism, “because of his recent activities” – he was only allowed to board the plane to Washington because of a misspelling of his name at Heathrow.
Yes, I guess that “Yusuf” bit might be slightly confusing.
It was not his first brush with immigration: he was deported from Israel in 2000 after claims that he had given money to the Palestinian group Hamas 12 years earlier, though he has always vehemently denied the claim: “I have never knowingly supported any terrorist group, past, present or future,” he stated.
But in yesterday’s Sunday Times, there was a piece at the front of the News Review section by Sarah Baxter, called I’m a Democrat for Bush. Ms. Baxter now lives in the USA and used to work for the New Statesman. In her piece, she mentions Yusuf(Cat) Islam(Stevens) in passing (page 3), and what she says throws a somewhat different light on the matter of the US Government not wanting him in the USA. → Continue reading: What sort of Cat?
I am intrigued by one of those little one-line links that Instapundit did yesterday, this time to a row between a Canadian politician and some Canadian bloggers.
This was only a matter of time. Bloggers in Canada are deleting posts after Warren Kinsella, an aide to former Prime Minister Jean Chretien, threatened them with legal action.
By the sound of it, there is very little that the blogosphere can do to make this Warren Kinsella person think better of his threats, although I would love to be proved wrong about that. Even by the standards of regular party politicians, he sounds like a fairly unpleasant character. All bloggers can do is publicise that he has made the threats, which I think he will be very happy about. He may be nasty but he is not stupid. He wants to be known as a political bully, if only to sell his book about how to be a political bully. Postings like Instapundit’s, and Cicada’s, and mine, are probably the exact thing he wanted to get from his legal round robin.
What this ruckus does show is how important the Internet in general, and the Blogosphere in particular, are becoming in generating publicity. Kinsella, as the author of a book called Web of Hate, does not make the mistake of calling the Internet insignificant while simultaneously raging against it. But to all those who still say that the Internet in general and the Blogosphere in particular do not count for anything, this row will be one more item of evidence under the general heading of ‘You Wish’. I mean, if politicians do not rate bloggers, why do they threaten to sue bloggers when bloggers say things they do not like?
In the age of the Internet, suing people is starting to emerge as a whole new way of communicating a message, to a lot of people, very economically, a point also made by Tyler Cowen at the Social Affairs Unit blog, in a posting about how Big Music is suing lots of downloaders. That, Cowen says, is what Big Music is trying to do also.
Depress yourself with this:
The Home Office is spending hundreds of thousands of pounds recruiting a PR team to sell the benefits of compulsory identity cards before legislation for the scheme has been before Parliament.
It is advertising for a head of marketing on a salary of up to £66,000 to promote the ID scheme not only to the public but to MPs and public sector groups. Legislation enabling the Government to set up a population database containing the details of every citizen and to begin issuing ID cards in three years is due to be included in the next Queen’s Speech.
From 2007, all new passports and drivers’ licences will double as ID cards. By the time they have been issued to 80 per cent of the country, Parliament will be asked to make the scheme compulsory for all. A programme team has been set up to mastermind the plan, including the testing of the biometric identifiers, such as iris prints, that will be included on the cards.
I recently defended democracy here, but this is its ugly side. I mean, if a majority gets to vote, and if out of that emerges a guy who wants us all to have these ID card things, and if most people have them anyway … what the hell, right? The difference between eighty and a hundred is, democratically, insignificant. But when it comes to liberty, that difference is all the difference.
I have no definite opinions about this alleged coup attempt that alleged Sir Mark Thatcher allegedly aided by alleged Jeffrey Archer (and alleged others) allegedly plotted. I have only now learned that the object of their disaffections was the government of Equatorial Guinea. But I have seen big headlines, and big pictures of Mark Thatcher looking furtive and ashamed. Thatcher himself now apparently denies having anything to do with the alleged plot, but then he would, now.
However, I cannot help noticing that it is being taken for granted that a coup in Equatorial Guinea would have been a self-evidently bad thing.
What kind of place is this? Well, I found some answers here.
The country’s current president, Teodoro Obiang Nguema, came to power in 1979 by leading a self-initiated coup that overthrew Francisco Macias Nguema, Obiang’s uncle and the country’s first president. In 1992, the government adopted legislation establishing a multiparty democracy. Since then, Obiang has been re-elected twice, most recently at the end of 2002, but both times amid opponents’ allegations of election fraud.
Charming. You can see how this guy would be sensitive about coup attempts.
Despite rapid growth in real GDP, there is strong evidence that oil revenues have been misappropriated by the government. Furthermore, the government’s failure to direct oil revenues toward development – especially to fund urgently-needed infrastructure improvements – has undermined economic and social progress in the country. Meanwhile, the rapid increase in public sector spending has increased inflationary pressures, translating into average growth of the consumer price index (CPI) of about 7% annually for the past few years.
Not exactly paradise on earth, is it?
All I am saying is: maybe a coup might have improved things.
It has been a while since I have visited the Dave Barry blog. So I had good reason to hope that when I went back there this evening I would find things of splendour and significance. I did. This, I think, was the best thing I found.
Garry I hate to break it to you. But the world is on the brink of disaster. World crime is at an all time high. And the only thing standing between order … and chaos … is us.
And then, the bit that really got my attention:
From the creators of South Park.
Relax. This is a movie. The world is not really on the brink of disaster. It just has to seem that way for entertainment purposes. It opens, somewhere – in London also perhaps? – on October 15th.
“Hey terrorists. Terrorise this.”
Indeed.
I also found this quite encouraging.
Spiders are more scary than terrorists – at least according to a survey of a thousand Britons released Monday.
Household creepy crawlies frighten Britons more than terrorist attacks, or even death, the survey found.
Which makes sense to me, and fits in with my experience. I am, I feel, far more likely to be terrorised by a creepy crawly than by a terrorist. After all, the War Against Terrorism has, in London, so far, touch wood and hope not to die, been going quite well, in the sense that none of London has been blotted out by terrorists recently.
On the other hand, we all know that the War Against Creepy Crawlies can only ever be a holding operation, and is doomed to eventual failure.
The famed Australian cricketer (and much else) Keith Miller has just died aged 84. While idling through some obit-ing about this remarkable man, I came across this amazing throwaway paragraph, seized upon by Tim Blair and included in the original posting, but originally in a comment, here:
After what he went through during the war, cricket always remained just a game to him. He flew Mosquito night fighters. A lifelong love of Beethoven saw him leave his group during a raid over Germany and fly a further 50 miles to Bonn, where he flew low, at some risk, over the city – just to see the place where his hero was born…
I had no idea that Keith Miller cared anything for such things as Beethoven, let alone that he cared that much. (And I am guessing that he did not endanger anyone else’s life besides his own, right? Perry?)
It is truly amazing how much new stuff you learn about people when they die.
Here is an interesting effect of the Internet, I think you will agree.
The Telegraph declines to run this article, and Mark Steyn declines to change it until they would.
So, he just sticks it up at his website anyway. (Without the Internet, might he have been more pliable? Without the threat of the Internet, would Mark Steyn be such a good writer?)
Quote:
Paul Bigley can be forgiven his clumsiness: he’s a freelancer winging it. But the feelers put out by the Foreign Office to Ken Bigley’s captors are more disturbing: by definition, they confer respectability on the head-hackers and increase the likelihood that Britons and other infidels will be seized and decapitated in the future. The United Kingdom, like the government of the Philippines when it allegedly paid a ransom for the release of its Iraqi hostages, is thus assisting in the mainstreaming of jihad.
By contrast with the Fleet Street-Scouser-Whitehall fiasco of the last three weeks, consider Fabrizio Quattrocchi, murdered in Iraq on April 14th. In the moment before his death, he yanked off his hood and cried defiantly, “I will show you how an Italian dies!” He ruined the movie for his killers. As a snuff video and recruitment tool, it was all but useless, so much so that the Arabic TV stations declined to show it.
If the FCO wants to issue advice in this area, that’s the way to go: If you’re kidnapped, accept you’re unlikely to survive, say “I’ll show you how an Englishman dies”, and wreck the video. If they want you to confess you’re a spy, make a little mischief: there are jihadi from Britain, Italy, France, Canada and other western nations all over Iraq – so say yes, you’re an MI6 agent, and so are those Muslims from Tipton and Luton who recently joined the al-Qaeda cells in Samarra and Ramadi. As Churchill recommended in a less timorous Britain: You can always take one with you. If Mr Blair and other government officials were to make that plain, it would be, to use Mr Bigley’s word, “enough”. A war cannot be subordinate to the fate of any individual caught up in it.
That last sentence would make a fine Samizdata quote of the day, and I nearly posted it that way instead.
Commenters will no doubt have all kinds of things to say about Scousers, Italians, the FCO, Mr Blair, etc. But what interests me about this little circumstance is that it is yet one more straw in the wind, gently falling onto the back of the camel that is the Mainstream Media.
It just cannot be such fun being an MSM editor these days. You spike an article. But it gets ‘published’ anyway, with your spike marks on it as a badge of pride.
Maritime Supremacy and the Opening of the Western Mind: Naval Campaigns that Shaped the Modern World 1588-1782
Peter Padfield
John Murray, 1999 (Pimlico paperback 2000)
I enjoyed this book a lot. It briskly and entertainingly filled in some huge gaps in my historical education, combining the reasonably familiar with the utterly unfamiliar.
I learned of crucial sea battles of which I had never previously even heard the name, some of them fought only a few dozen miles from the coast of my own country, in parts of the sea I had never heard of. For example, do you know what and where ‘The Downs’ is? Maybe you do. I did not, until now.
Peter Padfield starts his story with the launching of and failure of the Spanish Armada and ends with the success of the American Revolution two centuries later. These are the battles he highlights: Spanish Armada, The Downs, Sole Bay, Beachy Head, Barfleur/La Hougue, Malaga, Finisterre, Quiberon Bay, Chesapeake Bay, and The Saints.
Of all of those, I only really knew about the Armada. In 1588, Spain launches a huge fleet of huge ships, full of soldiers as well as sailors, whose job is to achieve sea supremacy in the English Channel and escort an army from the Continent to England, to subdue English Protestantism. But the soldiers never get to fight, because the English ships, more manoeuvrable and with better guns and gunners, refuse to close and fire at the Spaniards from a distance. The Armada is not destroyed by the English, but it fails to make an English invasion possible, so by the time it is scattered into the North Sea and beyond, it has already been defeated, in the sense of prevented from achieving its purpose.
The result of the defeat of the Armada is not the triumph of England (as had been implied by omission by my school teachers), but on the contrary, the emergence into their century of maritime dominance of the Dutch United Provinces, the first great Europe-based global maritime trading power of the modern era (unless you prefer to start with Venice). → Continue reading: Navigating individuals
I’ve searched all the parks in all the cities and found no statues of committees.
– G. K. Chesterton – quoted today on the BBC Radio 4 programme Quote Unquote – exceptions anyone?
|
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.
|
