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.
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One of the best summaries of the travesty that lead to Martha Stewart being convicted of, well, lying to avoid self-incrimination, can be found on WorldnetDaily by Samuel Blumenfeld:
Stewart was acting on information given to her. She did not build her wealth on a career of insider trading. It was a one-time fluke which involved a relatively small amount of money. When federal investigators questioned her on this transaction, she said that she had a standing order for her broker to sell the stock if the price went below $60.00. Apparently, that was the alleged lie that the jury convicted her on.
Here was the federal government, which couldn’t protect us from the terrorist attack of 9-11 in which thousands of people were killed, trying to protect us from Martha Stewart. The alleged lies she told were not told under oath. She did not commit perjury. Apparently it is now a crime to tell a falsehood to a government investigator. That’s considered an obstruction of justice.
Whatever you may think of Stewart’s action, she did not kill anyone or rob anyone. Her action did not result in anyone else losing anything. In other words, unless you believe that citizens don’t have a right to tell a falsehood to a government official in defending themselves from self-incrimination, Martha Stewart committed no crime.
Read the whole thing. The sickeningly self-righteous chortling of the predators of the wealth destroying US legal establishment just makes the whole thing worse and make it clear to me what really makes the legal world go around. If some ambitious prosecutor who thinks nothing of destroying lives and livelihoods in order to advance their own careers decides you are going to be their stepping stone, watch out. The state is not your friend.
Equitable Life is a mess, that is for sure. The responsibility of making sure the people who look after your money can be trusted ultimately lies with the owner of the money… the pensioners, the beneficiaries of what Equitable Life actually does. However if fraud or other gross misrepresentation is involved, and not just incompetence, ineptitude or misfortune, then things do change somewhat as it becomes a criminal matter.
However Equitable Life is massively regulated, so many of its weird business decisions must be seen within the context of the weird distorted environment within which it operates…
So yes, there is an argument that as the state should therefore also be liable for the mess. But then if you accept that, given that the British economy grows more regulated by the day, that would suggest investors should be lining up to claim tax money from the state every time anything goes bust. After all, what makes Equitable Life’s casualties any different from the casualties of any other business cock up?
We were off the air for a short while today because Hosting Matters were moving their servers into a security cage.
Call me cautious if you will, but I will wait a while before jumping for joy over this potentially wonderful news:
U.S. researchers will soon publish strong evidence of a recipe to generate fusion power with tiny bubbles, which does sound like a modern witch’s brew.
The power source is ultrasonic noise aimed at a clear glass canister whose size would qualify as a grande latte in a coffee house. The sound waves rattle through a liquid solvent in the glass and, as they do, create minute (on the order of a thousandth the width of a human hair) bubbles. Further sound causes the bubbles to expand, compress and then collapse. When they do, some of the hydrogen atoms in the liquid seem to fuse and give off light and energy.
Hmmm… What do our resident gearheads make of this?
But parts of it are bloody close.
Laura Bailey described her time in Kenya in a splendid travel article the other day and it damn near had me ordering tickets for the next flight out there myself. I have visited many of the places she mentions, although the most recent time was over twenty years ago. However much of what she describes just goes to remind me how timeless some places like the Masai Mara are.
I recall visiting the Masai Mara for a week, a few days before the great migration (the mass movement of about a zillion Wildebeests, closely followed by sundry hungry lions etc.) arrived at where they have to cross the Mara River. The scenery itself is simply stunning but when the Wildebeests arrive en-mass across the plains which were largely empty the day before, it is a truly amazing sight. Nor have I ever smelled anything so ‘memorable’ in my life.
Thousands upon thousands of Wildebeests drown whilst trying to ford the Mara River, many within sight of a bridge (they are not known for their brains), bringing crocodiles by the hundred to pick off the weak and vultures by the tens of thousands to feast on the ex-Wildebeest as their bodies quite literally clog the river. It is a breathtaking spectacle which has to be seen to be really appreciated.
If you are looking for a holiday with a difference, Kenya is an excellent place to try for all sorts of reasons, but do try to plan your itinerary so that you hit the Masai Mara. It is certainly one of the most fascinating parts of the world I have visited.
Simple really. Give them a vested interest to do so, a financial interest in fact. Create vast numbers of public sector jobs funded from the disloyal private sector and then what do you have? You have 7.4 million people (plus their families) who owe their ‘jobs’ to an expanding state and whilst the Tories are hardly the party of small government, it will hardly have escaped the notice of state employed workers that the number of public sector jobs from Maggie Thatcher onwards had been falling for 15 years… and under Labour they are growing at an astonishing rate.
However the real ‘loyalty lock-in’ comes not from merely giving people a job but rather from providing them with not just a lavish pension but an unfunded one at that! This means that only tax money can redeem these pension plans in the future because, unlike a private sector pension which is backed by investments (investments the state regularly raids for their own uses), there is nothing other than a government promise to pay with other people’s money underpinning what Mr. Buggins from Whitehall intends to retire on. As this is of course economic madness, only someone with a direct vested interest would vote to perpetuate such a giant ponzi scheme.
Alas, people directly effected by something like that are far more likely to be dependable focused voters, whereas a private sector employee may well not see the direct causal link between their declining purchasing power and their public sector neighbour’s pension plan.
Labour’s strategy is multi-election political genius. And of course by the time the economy implodes, people will have either largely forgotten what caused the problem or when faced with cutting pensions in fiat money to telegenic old grannies, will find someone else to blame (Capitalists, Jews, White People, Black People, Arabs, Americans, etc. etc.).
But then as the high priest of amorality once said, in the long run we are all dead anyway.
…which is seldom a bad thing.
Spiked-online is generally an interesting site, with challenging articles which often hit the nail (more or less) on the head. And sometimes not. In The geek shall inherit the Earth, I think that it would be best to say ‘your meta-context is showing’. I have met Sandy Star, and so can attest the author is a bright agreeable person, but I find myself questioning the thrust of this article even though agreeing with many of the specific points.
In essence Sandy is saying that the ‘mainstreaming’ of SciFi and Fantasy films suggests a retreat from reality and the stagnation of society, though he does not actually blame the science fiction/fantasy genres for causing this.
I would say some aspects of civil society are not just stagnating but are actually decaying in many ways, and it seems to me that one need look no further than the growth of regulatory statism to see the reason why this has happened. However it strikes me that Sandy’s characterisation of fans of the science fiction/fantasy genre too broad as obsessives can be found in all walks of life and as most of the people I know seem to like SciFi/fantasy, and none seem to exhibit the desire to retreat into fantasy obsessed atomised isolation, I do not think it is a reasonable generalisation. But I would suggest maybe it is actually a sign of an entirely countervailing current to the one represented by ‘real world’ politisization/desocialisation.
The prevailing democratic statist meta-context takes as an un-stated axiom that the political process is there to alter the form and incidence of as much personal interaction as possible, replacing them with politically derived formulae of behaviour, be it the way you can act towards then people you work with way you can interact with your children, what your house must look like, etc. etc.
But perhaps the fact so many folks want to read and watch stories of people (or werewolves/elves/vampires/daleks) operating within utterly different context and sometimes even meta-context quite removed from the one they see around them, indicates not stagnation or a rejection of reality, but rather a resistance to the intellectual stasis of the mind that modern political structures are trying to impose on civil society. It is nothing less than a willingness to think in other terms, based upon other axioms. Science fiction/fantasy authors often inform how we see the real world and it is no accident that Heinlein is so popular with libertarians and libertarian oriented conservatives. And I never found enthusing over Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light got in the way of me doing likewise about Karl Popper’s Open society and it’s enemies.
And as for the internet making us less social, that is quite incorrect. I have found that the contrary is true. The internet (and particularly the blogosphere) is about establishing networks that have huge implications in the real world… and these bring people together, in the real world. That is what brought me to a blogger bash in the Hollywood Hills a few months ago and will hopefully lead to me meeting up with a Czech blogger in Prague in a few weeks. It is what lead me to meet, face to face, all manner of people I have never met before and most likely never would have.
Oh and Sandy, if the science fiction/fantasy genres lead to ‘individuation‘, how is that a bad thing? Why is differentiating yourself from society undesirable? If so, as you are a fellow science fiction/fantasy geek like myself, I take it you think the Borg in Star Trek are the good guys then? Must be a flashback caused by that dormant Marxist nano-virus in the air-conditioning in the Spiked offices. Whilst I am rather partial to Seven of Nine, I do not think many people would agree with you.
The raison d’etre for being a politician, or to use that wonderfully explicit Americanism, a ‘lawmaker’, is to pass laws. This is a topic I have often pondered before. Without that ability, a politician’s power of patronage completely disappears and with it, the funds given by people who want laws enacted that tilts the table in favour their personal or factional interests. To be a politician is to see the world as something to be legislated.
Thus when I hear that there is another push in the US to pass laws that will ‘control the availability of pornography to minors’, I feel the urge to nod sagely and marvel at yet another example of the triumph of image over substance. Now I know you expect the usual rant from me regarding how such legislation is a violation of both freedom of expression and freedom of association, but as any regular reader of Samizdata.net already knows my views on that, let me just point out that what really interests me is that ‘lawmakers’ are so happy to pass laws that have no chance whatsoever of making the slightest difference to the perceived problem at hand. This is nothing new of course, but it is sometimes worth reminding oneself why this happens so often.
The public appearance of a politico ‘doing something’ is far more valuable to that politico than actually addressing the problems they are called on to fix. Thus the actual efficacy of a measure, or even the prospect of the law passing, is often largely incidental to the decision to try and enact a law. Thus if the ACLU, EFF, FOREST or whoever get a bill strangled at birth, the politico can shake his head sadly at his enraged backers and say “Hey, I tried, but those slimy [civil rights/capitalist/pinko/faggot] S.O.Bs got in the way”.
And thus a sublimely fungible business like Internet pornography, much of which already runs off servers in Romania, Bangladesh and Brazil (places not known for giving a flying whatever what laws get enacted in the USA), is going to be effectively regulated by some American law how exactly?
Do the majority of legislators actually care? Probably not, other that a small semi-demented cadre of folks from the less well travelled American hinterlands who probably cannot conceive that the world is filled with people who regard the antics of American Lawmakers with mild bemusement or utter indifference.
Iraq’s US appointed ‘governing council’ has produced a deal on a new national constitution which was described by a Kurdish delegate as one of the most liberal and progressive documents of its kind to have been produced in the Middle East
A coalition official said the charter sets a goal, not a quota, to have at least 25% of the national assembly made up of women. It also includes protections for free speech, religious expression, freedom of assembly and due process.
Free speech and religious expression? Due process? No quotas? At this rate Iraq may end up with a more (classically) liberal constitution that several quota addicted regulatory western nations I would mention. No, not really, as the whole ‘Islamic dimension’ rather precludes that.
There is a long way to go and the devil is not just in the details but the implementation. Nevertheless, this is a very big step in the right direction.
The Office of Fair Trading (the name being a splendid example of British irony in action) has ordered 60 private schools in the UK to hand over documents for an inquiry into alleged fee-fixing in violation of the 1998 Competition Act.
The OFT’s move provoked protests from the Independent Schools Council, which said it had “serious concerns about the protracted nature of this investigation and the effect it may have on schools”.
However, the ISC appeared to acknowledge that some schools may have fallen foul of a change in the law, but blamed the Government for failing to keep them informed.
Yet again we see that the scope and burden of state regulation is such that it is almost impossible for businesses to avoid breaking some laws unless they employ a ruinously huge staff of lawyers and ‘compliance officers’. Of course the very notion that the state, which imposes vast distorting pressures throughout the economy, can be an arbiter of ‘Fair Trading’ is almost beyond parody. As the Angry Economist said the other day:
Now, I would be the last person to claim that markets always produce good results. Some problems are hard for markets to solve simply because they are hard problems. Pointing to a problem which is hard for markets to solve doesn’t automatically mean that solution-by-government will be better. It may turn out to be that government interference will produce a better result (pareto optimal) than peaceful cooperation. I allow that as a possibility at the same time that I doubt it will ever happen, once all costs are accounted for.
The trouble is, as economies are complex networked systems, that it is not always obvious how this law over here buggers up that market over there. The distortions are often not a single causal step away and thus might as well be completely unrelated unless you are willing to take the time to really look at why things happen the way they do… and in most political systems, it is usually easier to just pass another law.
It will come as no surprise to anyone with a 100+ IQ and a modicum of knowledge about how the world works that Robert Mugabe and his murderous kleptocrats have appropriated more that £100 million (US $190 million) in aid sent to Zimbabwe by Britain and the EU.
As that was only to be expected, I cannot say it adds significantly to my loathing of the Mugabe regime. What does fill me with utter contempt is that the people responsible for this utterly predictable outcome still allowed the money to be sent in the first place.
As I have previously argued many times before about foreign aid, to send money for ostensibly humanitarian aims to a nation governed by a tyranny is to become the logistic support arm of that tyranny: insulating the regime from the economic (and hence political) consequences of its actions and thereby indirectly, but in a very real sense, making the regime more likely to survive than would otherwise be the case. That is true even if the humanitarian aid does indeed reach the people and projects it is targeted at.
This however is even worse than that. To send aid to Zimbabwe is to underwrite the tyrannical Mugabe regime directly as according to the latest report, 89% ends up in the pockets of Zimbabwe’s rulers rather than being spent on the humanitarian objectives for which it is intended. Thus not only can the people who sent the money not bask in their delusions that they have at least done good for those who benefit from the worthy projects, they might as well be buying weapons for Mugabe’s police and paramilitaries, not to mention making the bankers and shopkeepers in Zürich rather happy. They are directly supporting the tyrants with large cash injections.
As I disinclined to believe that the people in charge of the governments and agencies in question do not know full well where the money is going to end up, that makes them knowingly supporters of the regime. Which means they are supporting this:
Hilary Andersson, of the BBC’s Panorama programme, reveals how thousands of youths are being taught to rape, maim, torture and kill in Zimbabwe’s terror training camps – and now Robert Mugabe intends to make the camps compulsory for all the country’s young men and women
[…]
A former official with the Ministry of Youth, Gender and Employment Creation that oversees the camps, explained the government’s thinking. “You are moulding somebody to listen to you, so if it means rapes have to take place in order for that person to take instructions from you, then it’s OK,” he said. He was so horrified that he left his job with the ministry in disgust. Rape is just one of the ways camp commanders are able to turn their charges into unquestioning automata. The training methods vary from camp to camp, but the pattern is consistent.
If all that was happening was that the Guardian reading classes were getting a warm fuzzy glow because they were supporting British tax money going to ‘help stamp out poverty in the third world’, then that would be bad enough, given the reality of what this distorting flow of cash really does. But as Zimbabwe slowly morphs into an inept ‘North Korea Lite’, the platitudes and wilful ignorance of some are now directly funding truly monstrous horrors and misery because they are too damn lazy to think the whole issue through.
Of course if our political masters did not know this was going to happen when they decided to send huge chunks cash to a place like Zimbabwe, then they are naive to the point of idiocy and have no business being in charge of vast amounts of other people’s money to begin with.
So which is it?
There are several things which annoy the hell out of me regarding the ongoing ruckus over whether or not the British intelligence services have been spying on Kofi Annan and the UN generally, as alleged by Claire Short.
Firstly, the UN is nothing less than a logistics agency for tyrants around the world, insulating them from the economic consequences of their policies and ostensibly giving them equal standing with liberal human rights respecting regimes. Thus the notion that this institution’s leader, Kofi Annan, is some sainted figure beyond reproach (and beyond espionage) is both bizarre and repugnant. If we are to get any value from our pilfered tax money at all, I would hope some of it is spent spying on the corrupt functionaries at the United Nations.
Secondly, whilst I will defer to our in-house lawyer David Carr as to whether Claire Short’s actions constitute treason, at the very least I can only marvel how she was not immediately charged under the Official Secrets Act and thrown in jail… but silly me, I forgot there is one rule for the political, establishment and another everyone else.
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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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