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, it seems to have been a slow day here on Samizdata. Me, I’ve been putting up CD shelves and then preparing for one of my Friday evenings, so I’ve not had much time to samizdatise. But I now have time to get a link to this up before midnight, this being a strange sort of variable diagram where a bunch of cartoon economists watch what happens. That’s a bad explanation I realise. When this diagram gets taken down and historians of this blog wonder what I was talking about, they’ll just have to carry on wondering.
I don’t know what it signifies, but I find it oddly entertaining. Perhaps it refers to the tendency of economists to be rather too attentive towards merely numerical data, and to neglect more important but less measurable phenomena. So, not Austrian economists then.
My thanks to the deeply strange people at B3TA for the link to this.
I don’t fault Dan Rather for going to Baghdad. If someone had interviewed Hitler in ‘39 for three hours, we’d prize the tapes as an invaluable historical document.
– James Lileks from his Bleat this morning
Everyone is reactionary about subjects he understands.
– Robert Conquest, quoted in the Guardian, and then quoted again in The Week
I followed Instapundit to this:
America’s oldest institution of higher learning has hopped on the Internet’s hottest new trend, hiring software developer Dave Winer to help get students and faculty blogging.
Harvard University has given the former software executive a fellowship at its Berkman Centre for the Internet and Society, part of Harvard Law School, in order to head up the new Blogs at Harvard Initiative. Winer, who studied math at Tulane University before collecting his master’s degree in computer science from the University of Wisconsin, will instruct Harvard students and faculty in the art of posting daily dispatches to the Web.
→ Continue reading: “Anyone can do it!”
On the face of it the Conservative Party just now is having a terrible time, with the very telegenic Michael Portillo making life an utter misery for the deeply untelegenic Iain Duncan Smith. But something big is happening in the world which could see off the Labour Party for the next little slice of British history, and bring the Conservatives right back into contention.
The voters in Britain infuriate me. I like the people, by and large. Salt of the earth, most of them. But when they get around to voting, they have profoundly different priorities to me, or to anyone with a serious interest in politics.
Basically Britain’s voters would sooner vote for a party which is united in agreeing to do the wrong thing, than a party which is divided about just how enthusiastically it should resist that (or some other) wrong thing, or do any right thing. Division is all. Unity is all. They vote against the former and for the latter, regardless of what is being agreed or disagreed about. I loath and despise this, as I say, but that is how it is.
Well, for the last fifteen years, ever since the Cold War fizzled out, the Big Thing in British politics has been Europe.
Labour is a tiny bit disunited about it. Most Labourites love it that Europe gives them as much socialism as the real world is ever going to give them, in the form of a ocean of capitalism-hobbling regulations and interferences. A few Labourites aren’t satisfied only with that much socialism and would prefer more and on that basis they complain about Europe.
But such bickerings are nothing compared to the giant axe that Europe slammed into the very torso of the Conservative Party. Conservatives have been at each others’ throats about Europe for, as I say, the last decade and a half. It did for Thatcher. It did for Major. It did for the lot of them.
But now, post 9/11, the issue is no longer Europe. The issue is, to put it bluntly: the USA. Well, not the USA as such, merely its policy of choosing actively to prosecute the War Against Terror (i.e. against terrorists) rather than just hoping that terrorism and terrorists will go away. President Bush has decided to hunt them varmints until there ain’t none left, and what’s more to hunt down the no-good preachers who are stirring them all up, and if Europe don’t like it, too bad for Europe. As Bush said – in one of those scary speeches he made soon after 9/11, which sophisticated Europeans ignored as the gaseous emissions of a politician seeking mere poll numbers and re-election, but which Bush himself actually, it is now turning out, meant – either you’re with us or you’re agin’ us. That is now the Big Question.
And it so happens that the Conservatives are united in being with George Bush, less a few freakish europhiliac grumblers, while Labour is catastrophically divided about the War Against Terror (in the form that the Americans are now choosing to fight it), as today’s dramas in the House of Commons have now made very clear.
If it is true, as I found myself saying last week, that this War Against Terror thing is not just going to be an episode, but maybe something more like an era, then to that exact degree the news is now a lot better for the Conservatives.
I missed this story last week, and so, I’m guessing, did most of you.
A bricklayer plagued by migraines has turned his torment into a brainwave.
Hywel Edwards, 28, from Merthyr Tydfil in the south Wales Valleys, has invented a cap which allows a migraine sufferer to block out the light as well as surround their head with a cold press.
And the idea – thought up after two days’ agony when tablets and lying in a darkened room was not working – is set be a business winner.
The interesting thing about this invention is that Mr Edwards didn’t need any specialised scientific knowledge to think of it, and make it work. He just needed to know what already worked for him, but in a much less user friendly form. He knew that he needed cold applied to his head, and that he wanted the light to his eyes blocked out. It wasn’t rocket science. He just made it work.
Good for him. I hope Mr Edwards gets rich, and gives lots of others the idea that they too could strike it rich, simply by applying common sense and by applying, well, application.
It’s been a difficult time to be an England sports fan. First there was the shambles in South Africa with the cricketers. England, for all the difference it may make to anything serious, eventually refused to play their game in Harare, and Zimbabwe took all the points. And remember how I reported earlier, in my description of how cricket differs from baseball, that Zimbabwe even did better than England in the protest department. Well, this is a reminder that things like that can get serious.
Zimbabwean fast bowler, Henry Olonga, has been banished from the Takashinga Cricket Club following his public protest of political conditions in the country during a World Cup match.
That tells you a lot about the atmosphere in Zimbabwe just now. Hats off to Henry Olonga. He’s only 26 years old, but maybe he figures that cricket in Zimbabwe has no future to speak of anyway.
Meanwhile our footballers (that’s British football – not the rebel US variant) were humiliated by Australia, who are not supposed to be any good at that game. The Oz media went crazy, apparently. They do love to stuff the poms there, and stuffing us at cricket has got boring. → Continue reading: Rugby – and more on cricket
I have finally worked out to link to specific items in stephenpollard.net. Stephen Pollard is a man whom Samizdata.net readers should all be told about if they haven’t been yet. In addition to having his own blog, he also contributes regularly to this blog on European health issues run by the Centre for the New Europe (although linking to stuff in that is truly complicated and I won’t attempt it – just scroll down). And he’s a mainstream journalist of renown.
Two recent postings that get inside his head well are this, about Milton Friedman, and this, concerning the demonstrations last weekend, which also appeared in The Times. Here’s the conclusion of the Friedman posting:
Milton Friedman’s influence on the Left extends well beyond the NHS voucher. The congestion charge, introduced in London on Monday, has been lifted straight out of the professor’s 1951 essay, “How to Plan and Pay For the Safe and Adequate Highways We Need”: “[on] a crowded road…it would be desirable to discourage traffic…the people who drive on a road should be charged…in proportion to their use of the service”. As Ken Livingstone has put it: “I nicked the idea off Milton Friedman”.
Third Way, Shmird Way. Stand back, Tony Giddens; step forward, Milton Friedman, guru of the Left.
I also liked following this link, to a report about the events of June 7th 1981. Clue: CND ought to have liked it, but I’m guessing they didn’t.
As we await the Budget in March and the rise in National Insurance rates in April, you’ll be glad to know that Gordon Brown is responding to criticism that he’s made the tax system too complicated. The new tax form will have only two lines: ‘How much do you earn?’ and ‘Hand it over’.
– Eamonn Butler from yesterday’s Adam Smith Institute Bulletin
I’ve found another capitalist Object of Desire, via B3TA: WE LOVE THE WEB, whoever they might be. It’s a toaster.
Or is it? They were trying to sell stuff like this. So they rigged one of them up as this.
This Toaster is loaded!!!
It got:
800Mhz CPU (VIA C3).
128MB SDRAM.
40GB Harddrive.
16X DVD Drive.
Built-in Video and sound.
The HD-light is wired to the Bagel LED 🙂
You turn on the PC by pushing down the lever 🙂
Anyone like to try turning my cooker into a mainframe?
This looks as if it might be interesting, in the Far Oriental sense I mean.
Three giant cargo ships are being tracked by US and British intelligence on suspicion that they might be carrying Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
Each with a deadweight of 35,000 to 40,000 tonnes, the ships have been sailing around the world’s oceans for the past three months while maintaining radio silence in clear violation of international maritime law, say authoritative shipping industry sources.
The vessels left port in late November, just a few days after UN weapons inspectors led by Hans Blix began their search for the alleged Iraqi arsenal on their return to the country.
Uncovering such a deadly cargo on board would give George Bush and Tony Blair the much sought-after “smoking gun” needed to justify an attack on Saddam Hussein’s regime, in the face of massive public opposition to war.
The suspicious ones amongst us will no doubt be saying: how convenient! If it’s just what they wanted to happen, then who’s to say they didn’t make it happen?
Well, either way it is interesting. If it’s a real threat, then … well if that isn’t interesting to you then you are now having a near death experience, and the usual follow-up to that will be with you very soon. And if the Axis of Bush contrived it, then that just shows you that these guys are serious, and serious right about now (what with now being when they broke the story, the timing of which is interesting either way), which in my opinion is all to the good, but which I can understand others not liking so much. We may never know.
Here at Samizdata.net we have our own somewhat wordy house style, and we like to spell the stories out for the time when Samizdata.net roams the earth unchallenged, but paltry things like independent.co.uk have collapsed into oblivion. If this had been Instapundit (to whom, by the way, personal and Samizdata thanks for this link, which made quite a difference here yesterday), this would just have said something like: I don’t know what this is about, but it sure looks like something.
Indeed.
This Iraq business. Every few weeks I sit down and try to write something short and sweet on the subject and it soon grows long and ugly. Yesterday I did it again. Today I’ll try it yet again. (And hurrah! Here it finally is. But long and ugly, I’m afraid.)
So. Iraq. Blah blah blah, cut cut cut. And then this:
The USA is not just squaring up to Saddam Hussein because he is a big bad threat, although I’m sure that’s part of it. It is also going to take out Saddam’s Iraq because it is a good place to set about influencing other important places from, such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, and because it is takeable. Iraq is nasty, but it is also weak. Saddam Hussein is a monster and is known to be a monster, which makes him weak. Arabs aren’t nearly as opposed to the USA taking out Saddam as they would be if it attacked another of their countries, which makes him weak. Even the UN has resolved various things against Saddam over the years. So he’s vulnerable as well as threatening. The benefit of taking him out is big, while the cost of taking him out, by the standards of your average piece of conquest is quite low. I mean, imagine if the USA was instead trying to conquer Iran, or Egypt, or Saudi Arabia. Nightmare. Couldn’t happen.
The point is: USA thinking isn’t only about the rights and wrongs of invading Iraq, liberating the Iraqis, and stopping Saddam-bossed or Saddam-assisted future terrorist attacks. They have many other dishes on their menu besides him. The purpose of taking out Saddam is not just to take out Saddam, but to wrench the whole balance of power in the Muslim world into a different state, a state far less helpful to Islamofascist (and other) terrorists. → Continue reading: It won’t end with Iraq
|
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.
|
