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]
|
A while back, in a posting here about a meeting at the House of Commons addressed by Detlev Schlichter, at which James Delingpole was also present, I speculated that maybe Delingpole might at some point in the future choose to get stuck into the question of what has been going wrong with the world’s financial system.
So, I was delighted to encounter this recent Delingpole posting, about why the price of oil is going up. He features a video of Ron Paul saying that if you print lots and lots of money, everything goes up. Or, to put it another way, it’s not oil that is going up; it’s fiat money that is going down.
I see that Delingpole gives the Cobden Centre an appreciative mention, which will please them greatly.
Delingole, whose idea-spreading abilities I admire more and more, is a significant voice in the world. He has a huge following, which is well deserved. He takes important ideas seriously, but himself not so much, in a most engaging and yet informative way, the proof of his effectiveness being how much he gets up the noses of whatever bad guys he takes aim at.
If Delingpole could do to the world’s central banking racket what he has already done and continues to do to the world’s “climate science” racket, that might really be something.
Bishop Hill and WUWT are both making much of this:
To be effective, a new set of institutions would have to be imbued with heavy-handed, transnational enforcement powers.
If CAGW-inspired regulation is to make any sense, it must be universal. There must be a World Government. There are those of us who have long believed that this was why CAGW was devised in the first place.
Time was when economic success was believed to result from such “cooperation”, and to impossible without it. So, the language of tyranny was economics. Then – alas for the tyrants – it became clear that economic success and tyranny are opposites, although that lesson has still to be completely learned.
Now, the language of tyranny is a different kind of “science”.
A couple of months ago now, I went ahead and bought that new camera that I had for quite a while been thinking about buying. The circumstance that provoked me into making a decision earlier than I otherwise would have done was a trip, early in February, to Paris. Yes, it was cold:
That’s a water feature, somewhat frozen when I photoed it, in La Défense, the big clump of modern architecture in the west of Paris.
The thing that clinched it for it, in favour of the Panasonic Lumix FZ150, was how reviewer after reviewer used phrases like “an all round winner” and “all round best”, as in best for the sort of camera that I wanted, when writing about it. Such talk suggested to me: excellence in what I knew I wanted (zoom, picture quality, good video recording) together with excellence in other areas that I would only learn about after I had started using the thing. So it is proving.
The other camera I was considering buying was the Canon SX40 HS. I can’t compare my new Lumix with that, and will presumably never know for sure if I made the exact right choice. But I can compare my new Lumix with all the previous cameras I have ever owned, and in particular with my most recent previous camera, a Canon S5 IS. And I can now tell you that I am a very happy snapper. Could I have chosen even better? Perhaps. Have I meanwhile chosen well? It certainly feels that way now.
The x24 zoom supplied by the new Lumix is wonderful, just as I expected it would be. The Canon SX40 HS has x35 zoom, but I reckoned that x24 would suffice for my purposes and so it is proving:
That’s a snap taken last week from Primrose Hill. On a typical London day, the limits of how far your camera can see with clarity are set not by its lens but by the clarity of the air, which is mostly set at: not very. So I am very happy with my new zoom superpower.
Other improvements on my old Canon were not quite so expected. → Continue reading: My new Panasonic Lumix FZ150
Here is a list of things that you can buy, but which Michael Sandel (who I seem to recall doing a series of lectures for the BBC – yes) thinks it’s morally dubious for you to be able to buy.
I haven’t read all of them, but was immediately struck by this one, which strikes me as, on the face of it, a very good idea:
The right to shoot an endangered black rhino: $250,000. South Africa has begun letting some ranchers sell hunters the right to kill a limited number of rhinos, to give the ranchers an incentive to raise and protect the endangered species.
To Michael Sandel, this seems to mean that South Africa is being bad. But to me it sounds like South Africa is serious about preserving its now endangered black rhinos.
I have a definite recollection of noted South African libertarian Leon Louw having recommended just such a thing. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that he was partly responsible for this arrangement.
I myself won’t comment in detail on the rest of Sandel’s piece. It is complicated and I am about to go to bed. Parts of what he says strike me as true, parts not. But me saying only that needn’t stop other commenters going into more detail.
I dislike windmills because they are inefficient, destabilise the grid and put up my electricity bills. That I think, should be enough to stop building the things. That they kill bats and birds is not something that we should making too much of a fuss about. Buses, aircraft, and just about everything that moves does too. If we ban windmills because of the threat they pose to wildlife then logically there is an equal case to do the same to really important things. Remember, the Green lobby don’t actually love animals, they hate humans and anything they can do to screw up our society they will do.
– Bishop Hill commenter “AndyS”
Spring is in the air, and there is a spring in the step of the climate skeptic blogs these days, the two big ones on my radar being Bishop Hill and Watts Up With That. Peter Gleick‘s trickery, already written about here by Natalie Solent, combined with the willingness of so many on his team to try to promote him as some kind of hero rather than condemn him as the failed fraudster that he is (see also this posting about Michael Mann), means that although climate skepticism hasn’t won, it continues to win. Slowly but surely, C(atastrophic) A(thropogenic) G(lobal) W(arming) is being reduced from “science” to a racket.
Declarations of complete victory are surely premature. Much depends on how you define victory, and who or what you consider to be the enemy. If you care only about scientific truth, but not about the world being littered with damaging and expensive bureaucracies dedicated to perpetuating and enforcing lies, you may well indeed believe this battle to be nearly over. If those bureaucracies (to say nothing of the larger financial and ideological interests they serve) still trouble you, as they do me, you will regard the war as hardly having begun.
Some are saying that continuing to argue about the mere science of it all is a distraction from the more serious task of unmasking the motives and machinations of all those personages to whom all this fraudulent science has been so useful. I disagree. I say that showing this “science” to be dishonest leads naturally on to the question of who patronised it and to what end, given that the mere truth of things was emphatically not the only thing that concerns all those concerned. If the science of CAGW was now, still, universally accepted as honest, the underlying intentions of the various factions and characters responsible for foisting it upon the world would not now be attracting nearly so much scrutiny.
An immediate next task for the skeptic tendency is to itemise and publicise, in greater detail than hitherto, who is making money out of CAGW, a process that is already well under way. The longer term goal is to unmask the politics of it all. The bigger goal behind this hoax (and many others) was, and remains, to turn the entire world into a corrupt tax-and-spend superstate, run for the pleasure and enrichment of anti-progress, screw-the-poor-in-the-name-of-the-poor, global despots. That many very useful and desperately sincere – very useful because so desperately sincere – idiots are and always have been involved in this project is not in question. These idiots need to be challenged intellectually rather than merely denounced as crooks and tyrants, although showing them that crooks and tyrants is who they are really supplying aid and comfort to may also help to straighten them out.
In the post, and I should have read this book months ago: Watermelons. James Delingpole has been a key figure in ensuring that the CAGW ruckus (and the Climategate story in particular) escaped from the ghetto of blogs like the ones I linked to above, into the general arena of political discussion, and even to infect parts of the general public, now so curious to know why their heating bills are going ballistic. The thing about Delingpole is that not only has he done a fine job publicising the various scientific criticisms of the CAGW faith. He also understands what set the whole thing in motion in the first place. He gets the money of it. Above all, he gets the politics of it. When I have read this book, I’ll surely want to say more about it here.
I’m single and have no children and I would love to meet someone – but looking like Kim Jong-il doesn’t help.
– William Cheong, 43, a plumber who lives in Acton, West London.
Amazingly, @SteveBakerMP is a Tory. But when it comes to preventing bank abuses, he’s the man: http://bit.ly/yVwuXT
– George Monbiot
Incoming from Rob Fisher:
The Padfone is supposedly going to be available in April and now has a keyboard attachment too. There’s a good chance I will buy one.
The point of the Padfone is that it is a mobile phone, a tablet, and a regular computer with a regular keyboard, all in one big clutch of stuff. It has just the one “brain” so to speak, and it is all in the phone. When you want the tablet or the computer to power up, you stick the phone inside the tablet, and the phone does everything from in there.
This is what it all now consists of:
And this is how the phone goes into the back of the screen:
I found those pictures here.
And here is video of the(se) thing(s), being demonstrated by someone who knows his way around it/them.
Also prompted by Rob Fisher, I did a posting here about this same gadget last July, when it was merely due Real Soon Now. I am especially proud of this bit of commenting on that from me (which follows on from a bit about how Apple kit (such as my Apple keyboard which I use with my otherwise totally PC PC – which still works absolutely fine) just works more nicely:
And I am starting to love Asus in a similar, and yet also completely opposite, way. They too are now setting new standards. Not in the sense that their stuff works, the way Apple stuff works. It doesn’t. But, it does work, as a specification. Their stuff says to everyone else: this is what you now have to make work, and this is what you have to charge for it. Look at all the people blogging about this, and even pre-ordering it, poor fools. This is the next Thing, people. Just do it.
Not every commenter agreed that this Padfone idea was a runner. Many thought the demand just would not be there for this new set of toys, and some who did think the idea a good one doubted whether the Asus version would be a success. We shall soon be finding out who was right.
Personally I love the idea, but have my doubts about Asus making it work well (based on bad experiences with the Asus Eee-PC). If I am wrong, and this spec doesn’t catch on, it will be Asus and their immitators who lose money, not me. If only the world’s financial system could work this well.
If this set of toys, or some set very like it, does catch on, my non-geek sense is that this will maybe represent a huge breakthrough for Google and their Android operating system, because Android was all along designed with this kind of integrated all-in-one system in mind? Yes? Maybe: no. What do I know? But, comments on that last point in particular would be much appreciated.
To the nearest whole number, the percentage of the world’s energy that comes from wind turbines today is: zero.
– Matt Ridley hails The Beginning Of The End Of Wind. Let’s hope he’s right. The piece is quoted from at greater length by Bishop Hill and at WUWT.
See, or rather, hear also: Matt Ridley’s eloquent recorded talk a while back, on the general subject of environmental scaremongering, of the sort that has been used to excuse the wind farm disaster, also linked to by Bishop Hill.
I was just about to do a posting here linking to this Anton Howes piece, but I see that Johnathan Pearce has go there first, see below. I strongly agree about the importance in particular of student libertarianism, which the Liberty League is doing so much to encourage.
The only thing I now need to add to that is that earlier this week I promised Anton Howes I would mention here that the Liberty League‘s Freedom Forum 2012 is coming up soon, on the weekend of March 30th/April 1st, in Newcastle.
This is not a convenient place for me, but is massively more convenient for northern English and Scottish libertarians than such an event as this would be if held in my own London, as most such British events have tended to be. I hope this event goes really well.
I see that occasional Samizdatista Alex Singleton is already signed up as a speaker.
Your teeth belong to the collective.
– From a Planet Money piece quoted by Alex Tabarrok (who was linked to today by David Thompson), about how China went from the bad old days of the Great Leap Forward to the better days that followed. The above words, which Thompson also singled out for attention in his link, were an answer to a property rights query to those in authority, in the bad old days. Do we even own our teeth? No you do not.
The switch from collective “property” to actual property, as Tabarrok makes clear, was initiated by the people of China, rather than by their rulers. It began in the village of Xiaogang, whose farmers decided to go back to actual property for each individual farmer and his family, with immediate beneficial effects. And then it became a movement. The rulers of China didn’t decide to make this change. They merely decided not to stamp it out.
|
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.
|
