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Today is our blogiversary…Samizdata crawled out of the primordial ooze of the blogosphere on Friday, November 02, 2001. Our name was a wee bit longer then but like some vestigial tail, it eventually dropped off once we learned to walk upright… and it took us a while for our flippers to evolve into feet… but here we are all those years later, still blathering on about the things that irk or amuse us. 13,315 articles and 226,617 comments later… …Blimey, where did all those years go? November 2nd, 2011 | 56 comments - (Comments are closed)
 (via Small Dead Animals) October 30th, 2011 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
It bears repeating that banks are not creators of wealth. They are places where you store the surplus value generated by productive enterprise. In very narrow circumstances that surplus value can be loaned out at a profit, but a financial sector is the icing, not the cake. This should be common sense, but apparently it is wisdom so rare it can only be learned in countries small and remote enough to avoid the deadly medicine of the global financial markets. October 28th, 2011 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
… sayeth the Telegraph…
Well ok, that is entirely possible. But does the fees that ‘prudent savers’ get charged not pale into insignificance compared to year after year of what artificially (i.e. politically driven) low interest rates has done to the very notion of being a ‘prudent saver’? Indeed if you simply save your money in some safe low yield instrument, in such an environment as we find ourselves today you are not being a ‘prudent saver’ at all. There is nothing prudent about it as your money is very unlikely to maintain its value vis a vis inflation… and that is exactly the intention behind the policies of the Fed and Bank of England. They want you to spend in order to appease the animal spirits that drive the economy, rather than be a ‘prudent saver’. That is who would-be ‘prudent savers’ should be railing against. October 19th, 2011 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
I was responding to a comment under this article… when it struck me: why do so many people find this screamingly obvious fact so bloody hard to figure out?
No, the politicians who bailed them out with taxpayer money stole ‘our’ money after they created the moral hazard that led to the banks doing the things that they were given the incentives to do. In a sane world, said bankers should have simply been allowed to go bust… so the problem is not ‘bankers’, it is the people who refused to let the bastards go broke by giving them third party… taxpayer… money. October 15th, 2011 | 29 comments - (Comments are closed)
But the 9/11 deniers have two mighty weapons. One is technological. In the age of the internet, if you don’t want to read evidence that contradicts your fantasies, then you don’t need to. Just visit one of hundreds of websites that will supply you with freshly minted “evidence” to replace any bits of your theory that have fallen apart on you. The other weapon is cultural. Thanks, in part, to multiculturalism, facts have been reduced to accessories in the West’s intellectual wardrobe. The postmodern message is that your version of reality is part of you; don’t let inconvenient truths damage your customised worldview and your self-esteem – Damian Thompson. Often when I quote Thompson it is to fisk him but this one hits the nail squarely on the head. September 11th, 2011 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
Just when we [have] the strongest possible proof that Keynsianism doesn’t work, someone yells for an encore – Commenter “J Cuttance” on the Telegraph September 5th, 2011 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Scottish Conservative Party set to disband” screams the title of an article… Well why not? Scotland already has two Mega-Statiist major parties (SNP and Labour) so what need is there for a third? Indeed perhaps a new party north of the border might actually be, you know… conservative! If that comes to pass, perhaps someone might decide England needs a conservative party too because gawd knows it does not have one at the moment. September 4th, 2011 | 33 comments - (Comments are closed)
Apparently Greece has stopped the export of Tzatziki and Taramasalata… They’re worried about a double dip recession… – Bert Trubshaw, seen in the comments over on the Telegraph. September 1st, 2011 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
So I suppose the jet she flew in on from her home in Colorado worked on rubber bands. – a commenter called ‘SouthendViking’ on the Telegraph, remarking about actress Daryl Hannah, who was arrested at a protest where she reportedly said:
Greens… they want us living as serfs in a pre-industrial society. August 31st, 2011 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
As I mentioned earlier, the TV networks are giving this wall-to-wall coverage. TJ Holmes on CNN is repeatedly calling it a “monster storm”, and everyone is desperately trying not to mention that it has been downgraded to a category one hurricane, the weakest category in the Saffir-Simoson hurricane scale. The politicians are falling over themselves to be seen to be doing something. The president, Barack Obama, called it a “historic” hurricane yesterday and has returned to the White House a day early from his vacation at Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. He is desperate to avoid the mistakes of George Bush, who was slow to act over Hurricane Katrina. Here in New York, mayor Bloomberg was slammed over his slow response to the big snow dump last year. City Hall is at the end of my street – they’ve been up all night there, co-ordinating the response to this. Hurricane Irene is political, as well as meteorological. August 27th, 2011 | 44 comments - (Comments are closed)
The sheer idiocy of this speaks volumes of the rot at the heart of British society and its decadent political class. A different take on this can be found here. August 26th, 2011 | 31 comments - (Comments are closed)
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