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]
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I tend to have a “half empty” view of the world – but even I do not believe that the British population contains no pro freedom people. Indeed I believe that there are millions of pro freedom people in Britain – and basically the British book trade was telling us all to bugger off, that we were not welcome in the book shops.
Well we got the message – it is not all “the internet” that is the reason for the decline of the British book trade, basically they were telling non-socialists that our custom was not wanted.
– Paul Marks
Violence must be replied to with violence. The only time I would suggest turning the other cheek is when firing off the left shoulder with a rifle after taking cover in a doorway.
– Perry de Havilland commenting here
Never mind he is debasing the currency and starting us on the road to runaway inflation, is functionally indistinguishable from Tony Blair and his ‘savage cuts’ are a fiction simply parroted by a mainstream media seeming unable to do simple math… he has ‘Ease and authority’
Well, phew, good to know! I guess we’ll be ok then!
– Perry de Havilland commenting on a Telegraph blog article claiming that “Ease and authority make David Cameron hard to beat“
This was one of the more splendid comments that we have had on Samizdata in quite some time: David Gillies, regarding this manifest steaming pile: the deceptively named “World Health Organisation” claiming mobile phones increase the risk of brain cancer.. even though there has been no observed spike in brain cancer despite the explosive growth in the use of such phones world wide….
This has been headline news in every newspaper I have seen, including the leading daily here in Costa Rica, and none of ’em have been fit to wrap fish in (I’d wager there’s a far higher carcinogenic propensity in the ink used to print this shit.) Non-ionising radiation? Check. Sub-milliwatt power levels? Check. No causative mechanism that survives the laugh test? Check. Decades of use and no detectable increment in tumours at the lax 2.0 relative risk for publication in a halfway-reputable journal? Check. Defeats the null hypothesis at the 95% confidence interval? Ha ha ha, oh my sides. Soundbite-ready quacks straining in their traces to leap into the running on CNN and Fox and Sky and the Beeb to peddle doom-mongering (but possibly book-selling) crap? Mais bien sur, a regiment of them. The disgusting WHO ready to dip its grubby fingers into the whole stew of idiocy and rent-seeking? Ho, yus, my chilluns, and when were they ever not? Pathetic.
If you cannot, within say 30 seconds, get a ballpark figure for the photon energy in microelectronvolts of an 1800 Mhz photon (and why that matters), or describe qualitatively what a femtowatt is (not quantitatively, oh no, that won’t do at all) or give a fairly robust description of what ‘3 dB/octave’ means when it comes to microwave absorption coefficients then shut your face, crawl back under your silly epidemiological stone, and die of something real and not imagined. Maybe the publication-hungry pseudoscientists that infest this field might be able to do all of the above as some sort of parlour trick, but the notion that your average journalist could is as laughable as spaniels doing differential equations. And this isn’t the argumentum ad verecundiam, like it is with the global warming zealots. There’s practically no-one in the hard sciences who thinks that microwave radiation is a causative agent in cancers. It’s lies, sophistry and nonsense. The really big question to ask (like with the AGW scam) when you see a scientific fraud being perpetrated on this scale is, as ever, cui bono?
– David Gillies
Meanwhile, over at the global superpower, the public is slowly waking up to the fact that this government, too, is going bust, thanks to out-of-control entitlement programs, expensive bailouts, and the suicidal policy of everlasting peace through everlasting war. For the past six months, all of the United States government’s issuance of new debt has been bought by its compliant central bank and paid for by the printing press. As the politicians of this empire in decline are fiddling on the aptly named Capitol about a few billion in savings here and a few billion there, trillions are getting burned by the unstoppable state machinery. And over in Albion, the hotly debated “savage” cuts in public spending still seem the figment of tabloid imagination as they have so far not prevented the country from accumulating another £145 billion in debt over the past 12 months.
– Detlev Schlichter
New drink, “The Bin Laden”: two shots and a splash of water.
– via Alisa
Like two drowning sailors hanging onto one another in order to postpone the inevitable, overstretched banks thus accumulate the debt of insolvent governments to keep the façade of solvency up.
– Detlev Schlichter
That is one suspected reason for why the Icelandic government was so eager to roll over for the Dutch and the British – they were willing to bankrupt the nation to get their snouts trotter-deep into the EU troughs. If this means I can’t join the EU I regard the referendum result as a double win.
– Commenter Bjarni
I am, therefore I’ll think
– John Galt
And that is called paying the Dane-geld; but we’ve proved it again and again, that if once you have paid him the Dane-geld you never get rid of the Dane.
– Rudyard Kipling
The government can take away my freedom, but if they take away my internet porn, they’re going down
– @arabist
… that ‘tax pros’ are worried that tax evasion will be greatly increased by new regulations in the USA
Tax pros now fear that tax evasion could go viral if the health-reform bill’s new 1099 requirement takes effect next year. They say more small businesses will likely opt to do all-cash transactions under the table to avoid the 1099 reporting requirement, and all of its onerous provisions, which are worse than small businesses may realize.
“Tax evasion could go viral”… what a pleasing concept. Well all I can say to these unnamed ‘tax pros’ laboring away tirelessly to make people ‘compliant’ is “from your lips to God’s ear”.
Few things would help the growth of the culture needed for a fight back of liberty to succeed than something that not only induced contempt for the state but actively motivates self-interested resistance to the supra-constitutional tax gathering arm of the US government… and perhaps the single best form of resistance to an over-mighty state is keeping as much money as possible out of its hands.
Encouraging tax evasion: far from being an ‘ugly side effect’ it is the unforeseen silver lining that may tip millions of apolitical business folk into unwitting de facto alliance with liberty’s anti-statist friends.
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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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