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 suppose it is a sign of advancing years, and having lost some close friends to cancer or having been scared by a close relative’s condition that the notion of a cure for the gremlin should weigh on my mind a bit more than it used to. (You are definitely getting old, Ed). I cannot help noticing, when reading Instapundit as I do every day that Glenn Reynolds has been putting up regular links to the growing use of nanotechnology in delivering cancer-busting chemicals to the body with incredible accuracy. Here’s another one. The more accurate the delivery of the drug, so the reasoning goes, the fewer the unpleasant side-effects associated with things like chemo treatments, and the greater chances of beating the cancer. The steady trickle of news items and articles has yet to become a flood, but I have this sense that the flood may be pretty close.
When I read Engines of Creation by Eric Drexler back whenever it was, the idea of tiny nanobots being used to treat cancer was, then, still on the edge of what folk thought might be possible. There is a way to go yet but it is a mark of how certain stories get below the radar of current events that nano-medicine has crept up on us so quickly, rather as the internet did about 20-odd years ago.
Faster please!
I generally like the columns of William Rees-Mogg on economics; while he is no hardline free marketeer like the scribes here, he has a sharper nose for the errors of interventionism than many MSM writers. He also has a knack – which comes from a man who is of great age – for putting current events into a proper historical context. But he makes this statement in his generally admiring writeup on Roosevelt that is surely downright wrong. Not just a teeny-weenie bit wrong, but disastrously so for this whole argument:
In March 1933, when Franklin Roosevelt was inaugurated as president, he had to face the Slump. Unemployment was by then running at about 30 per cent. Roosevelt introduced the New Deal, based on an extensive programme of raising employment through public works. Unemployment did actually fall to about 5 per cent by the time of Roosevelt’s second election victory in 1936. There continued to be stumbles along the way, particularly in 1937.
Well according to official US statistics referred to here, unemployment certainly did not fall anything like as low as that during FDR’s 1930s period in the White House, and then only dropped significantly once the Second World War started.
I do not know where Rees-Mogg got his figures from or what sort of statistical resource he is using, but this is not a minor discrepancy. To suggest that unemployment fell as low as 5 per cent in the mid-1930s seems to fly totally in the face of the official data.
As Brian Micklethwait noted the other day, the UK news satire quiz show, Have I Got News For You, is sometimes a quite accurate barometer of how opinion is trending among what I might call the self-consciously trendy chattering classes. The latest episode was compered by some comedian I vaguely recognised who looks like a slightly supercilious upper sixth former. Understandably, a lot of the quiz was taken up with taking the piss out of the disgusting Speaker of the House of Commons, Michael Martin, over his recent shambolic performance over the Damian Green affair. Like Brian, I am now going to recall the following bit of dialogue. There will be some words missing but here is the gist of it:
Ian Hislop: It is amazing, isn’t it, that they were were able to get 20 or so policemen to raid Mr Green’s offices and search his house. Where are all these guys when you need to catch a burglar or something?
Compere: Ah, yes, that sounds like the sort of drivel you read in the Daily Mail.
Hislop: So let me get this right – are you saying that is perfectly okay for a bunch of anti-terror policemen to arrest, search and hold an MP for asking annoying questions in the House of Commons?
Compere: I am in all in favour of putting Tory MPs in jail.
Hislop: raised eyebrows, obviously thinking to himself “I cannot believe this fascist prick, how did we get him on the show”?
Like I said, HIGNFY is an interesting temperature gauge on UK current affairs. And my impression was that Hislop regarded the Damian Green affair as an outrage, while a lefty “comedian” regards it is acceptable to crack jokes about locking up MPs just because of their views. These supposedly “edgy” or “cutting edge” comedians are nothing of the sort. They are, now, part of the establishment. I was not laughing, and neither was Mr Hislop.
Anyway, later in the show the poor compere was hopelessly inept at reading out the scores. Hislop made his life hell.
Here is an interesting article about how Wal-Mart, the bete noire of the anti-globalistas, acted much more effectively and efficiently in helping the victims of Hurricane Katrina a few years ago than was the case with Federal or other state agencies.
What the article does not really discuss, however, is whether companies ought to be doing things like this at all. There is the old Milton Friedman line that a company has one duty only: to benefit its shareholders by making a profit. But of course if shareholders vote in company meetings in favour of allowing their company to spend some money in certain civic endeavours, then as a supporter of private property rights – of shareholders – then I have no problem with that at all. If a company whose shares I own starts to engage in all manner of “social” projects that I think show the firm is increasingly being run by twerps, I can always dump the stock or even, assuming it is not banned, short-sell the shares to punish the firm for not being professionally run.
That approach is, of course, very different from those advocates of what is called “corporate social responsibility” who might want to legislate to force firms into such activities, which blurs the political and business spheres. It enables politicians, for example, to bring about changes without having to explicitly say how these are going to be paid for. Such public-private partnerships are all too often about concealment of cost.
This book reviewer says the 1930s were, on the whole, a pretty good time to be British. It is a point of view one does not come across very much, that is for sure. The stock image of the 1930s is the era that saw the rise of the Nazis, the Great Famine in the USSR, the Great Depression, Roosevelt, the Royal Abdication Crisis, etc. But was there more to it than that, at least at home? The book says that British society was in some ways in pretty good shape.
In military terms, at least by the end of the 1930s Britain had evolved what ultimately proved to be a very well organised air defence system, with radar and nifty fighters like the Spitfire. The 1930s was stylistically elegant: the cars of that era looked absolutely glorious.
On the other hand, I would argue that the 1930s was a period in which limited government continued to be under siege and apostles of planning and greater government regulation were gathering momentum, to reach fruition – if that is quite the right word – in 1945 with the election of the Attlee Labour government.
Discuss.
I could not resist this:
Why did the chicken cross the road?
BARACK OBAMA: The chicken crossed the road because it was time for a change! The chicken wanted change!
JOHN MC CAIN: My friends, that chicken crossed the road because he recognized the need to engage in cooperation and dialogue with all the chickens on the other side of the road.
HILLARY CLINTON: When I was First Lady, I personally helped that little chicken to cross the road. This experience makes me uniquely qualified to ensure – right from Day One! – that every chicken in this country gets the chance it deserves to cross the road. But then, this really isn’t about me.
GEORGE W. BUSH: We don’t really care why the chicken crossed the road.. We just want to know if the chicken is on our side of the road, or not. T he chicken is either against us, or for us. There is no middle ground here. DICK CHENEY: Where’s my gun?
COLIN POWELL: Now to the left of the screen, you can clearly see the satellite image of the chicken crossing the road.
BILL CLINTON: I did not cross the road with that chicken. What is your definition of chicken?
AL GORE: I invented the chicken.
JOHN KERRY: Although I voted to let the chicken cross the road, I am now against it! It was the wrong road to cross, and I was misled about the chicken’s intentions. I am not for it now, and will remain against it.
AL SHARPTON: Why are all the chickens white? We need some black chickens.
DR. PHIL: The problem we have here is that this chicken won’t realize that he must first deal with the problem on this side of the road before it goes after the problem on the other side of the road. What we need to do is help him realize how stupid he’s acting by not taking on his current problems before adding new problems.
OPRAH: Well, I understand that the chicken is having problems, which is why he wants to cross this road so bad. So instead of having the chicken learn from his mistakes and take falls, which is a part of life, I’m going to give this chicken a car so that he can just drive across the road and not live his life like the rest of the chickens
ANDERSON COOPER, CNN: We have reason to believe there is a chicken, but we have not yet been allowed to have access to the other side of the road.
PAT BUCHANAN: To steal the job of a decent, hardworking American.
MARTHA STEWART: No one called me to warn me which way that chicken was going. I had a standing order at the Farmer’s Market to sell my eggs when the price dropped to a certain level. No little bird gave me any insider information.
DR SEUSS: Did the chicken cross the road? Did he cross it with a toad? Yes, the chicken crossed the road, but why it crossed I’ve not been told.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY: To die in the rain, alone.
JERRY FALWELL: Because the chicken was gay! Can’t you people see the plain truth? That’s why they call it the ‘other side.’ Yes, my friends, that chicken is gay. And if you eat that chicken, you will become gay, too. I say we boycott all chickens until we sort out this abomination that the liberal media whitewashes with seemingly harmless phrases like ‘the other side.’ That chicken should not be crossing the road. It’s as plain and as simple as that.
BARBARA WALTERS: Isn’t that interesting ? In a few moments, we will be listening to the chicken tell, for the first time, the heart warming story of how it experienced a serious case of moulting, and went on to accomplish its lifelong dream of crossing the road.
ARISTOTLE: It is the nature of chickens to cross the road.
JOHN LENNON: Imagine all the chickens in the world crossing roads together, in peace.
BILL GATES: I have just released eChicken2008, which will not only cross roads, but will lay eggs, file your important documents, and balance your check book. Internet Explorer is an integral part of eChicken2008. This new platform is much more stable and will never cra.#@&&^(C%……….reboot.
ALBERT EINSTEIN: Did the chicken really cross the road, or did the road move beneath the chicken?
COLONEL SANDERS: Did I miss one?
And someone added SARAH PALIN: I’m not really qualified to answer that question [wink], but I can assure Joe six-pack [wink] and all the hockey moms [wink] out there that I know what really matters to them [wink]. Incidentally [wink], I can see a road from my house, so I must be qualified to cross it…
Iain Martin is rapidly becoming one of my favourite columnists. This article explains why.
A recent book which looks at tensions between free markets and the short-term interests of incumbent businessmen, this book is great. It was written shortly before the credit crisis went into overdrive and its warnings about a stampede into regulatory overkill are very apt.
I have just returned from a short business trip to Geneva in Switzerland and apart from the usual chatter about the disasters that have befallen the banking system – including such titans as UBS – the chatter in the cafes was about voters’ recent decision to allow heroin to be given to drug addicts in medical centres. Switzerland’s experiments with a more liberal approach to drug use has not been without unfortunate result: I remember that some time ago, there was a park in Zurich that got the unfortunate title, “needle park”, on account of the number of folk who used to congregate there from all over to get their fix of heroin. But perhaps that is a sort of example of how, if you have “public spaces” – owned by the nation and hence owned by no-one in particular – what might be a matter of private behaviour can lead to “negative externalities”. The solution, maybe, is for drug users to indulge their habits on private property with the consent of the owners of said; then the issue ceases to be one on which the polity feels a need to express a view one way or the other.
But the Swiss are nothing if not contradictory and the locals do not seem to share a very coherent conception of what the state can or should be able to tell people to do, but I do sense that there is less of a nanny state culture than in Britain. The locals tell me that there is, still, more of a culture of self-responsibility than in some other European nations. But the contradictions are odd: while approving the heroin measure, Swiss electors rejected a proposal to make marijuana legal and to be able to grow it for personal use. And yet this is a nation where smoking continues to happen in restaurants; firearms ownership is far more liberal than in the UK; ditto things like knives and swords; bank secrecy, while not quite as solid as before, remains; and the nation, to its credit, remains cussedly uninterested in joining the EU or allowing itself to be bullied by tax collectors in places such as Germany and the US.
And the chocolate tastes pretty good as well. Yummm…..
Henry Porter, who to his immense credit has been telling it like it is on the civil liberties issue in Britain for several years, has a strong article in the Guardian on the arrest of Damian Green and the government’s miserable behaviour since.
As he puts it, the arrest of one of their own has finally woken MPs up to what is going on. It is hard not to feel a certain bitterness at MPs’ complacency on these issues for many years, but better late than never. The arrest of an MP in such circumstances must count as the ultimate “canary in the coalmine”.
What a way to mark the State Opening of Parliament. At the time of writing I do not know if the Speaker of the House of Commons has been sacked yet or resigned.
My respect for the EU Referendum blog, one of my daily reads, has just cratered. It argues that because the person leaking immigration details to Damian Green had sought to get a Tory party job, and the leaks of such data were a serious matter, that the authorities were entirely right to treat Mr Green as they did. As far as EUR is concerned, we are all getting het up about nothing and that it is high time that politically motivated civil servants were given a warning. This is nonsense: given the vast number of leaks out of the government that often have direct impacts on things like financial markets, the use of sweeping laws to deal with such matters is bizarre.
What on earth has got into that blog’s authors that they should seek to excuse the use of anti-terror police in dealing with leaks that while embarrassing, posed no danger to UK national security? Had the EU acted in this way, that blog would have gone ballistic.
Update: EUR continues to attack those who are attacking this arrest, arguing that if the cops had suspicions that something was fishy about Mr Green’s activities, they were entitled to act as they did. But again, why the use of anti-terror police when this was plainly not an issue that raises national security issues?
I see that the Devil’s Kitchen blog, which normally has little time for the intrusions of state power, goes into an incoherent rant at MPs’ expense, saying, pretty much, that Members of Parliament have been such poor custodians of our liberties – which is a true fact – that they deserve no sympathy now that the guns are turned on them. Well yes but so what? The point that DK misses is how this story plays, or should play, straight into the hands of civil libertarians anxious to focus attention on how out of control government and its agents now are. As Brian Micklethwait said the other day, this story is great news for civil libertarians, and terrible for the government. Perhaps EU Referendendum and DK are so consumed with hatred for the Tory Party that they are untroubled by the significance of last week’s arrest other than to yell abuse.
The other night I rented out the DVD based on life in former East Germany, The Lives of Others. It is about what life in the former Communist state was like in the fag-end of the Cold War era. It portrays the extent to which people were spied on by the Stasi, and the brutal efficiency with which that organisation went about its job. It does not sound very promising material for an evening in front of the TV but the film is simply outstanding. I strongly recommend it.
Inevitably, given recent UK events and the government’s mania for CCTV, abuse of civil liberties and assault on the Common Law, the film has a certain poignance for a British viewer. It is also clearly apparent to me that once a critical number of people become involved in spying on others and earning a living from doing this, it is very hard to dislodge it but East Germany eventually crumbled along with the Berlin Wall. When, I wonder, will ZanuLabour have its 1989?
As the terrible events in Mumbai have reminded us – I have some ex-colleagues who work there – terrorism remains an ever-present threat. Even while the economic stories dominated our news headlines in recent months, I had a nagging worry that the jihadis were not going to pass up the chance to strike, particularly with a new US president on the way. So terrorism is back as a topic in the most awful way imaginable.
So it is all the more extraordinary that counter-terrorist police, instead of actually trying to deal with terrorists, were instead employed in the highly dodgy arrest of Tory MP Damian Green, who had received leaked information on immigration into the UK and who, like any half-competent politician, was trying to use this information to add to the debate on immigration. Now whatever one thinks about immigration – and Samizdata has gone over this issue many times – it seems deeply sinister that a man who had received leaked details about the numbers involved should find his collar felt by Pc Plod. Considering all the vast numbers of leaks out of the government, which sometimes have direct impacts on markets and livelihoods, this is bad. This is the first time I can recall that a senior MP has been arrested on what looks suspiciously like an attempt by the authorities to shut up a political party. No wonder that Tory leader David Cameron is demanding action on this. Whether he gets it remains to be seen.
Mr Green’s actions are not remotely in the same bracket as the very serious allegations of receipt of oil-for-food funds that have been levelled against the Saddam apologist, George Galloway. At least in the latter case one could see why Galloway should, at the very least, have had a little chat with the police. As for Mr Green, his treatment looks downright sinister. When people throw around the words “police state” to describe what Britain has become, it all too easy to roll the eyes. But if this case does wake this country up a bit, it will have served some purpose.
Philip Johnston in the Daily Telegraph agrees.
Update: Old Holborn puts up this graphic, via Guido Fawkes.
Suggestion to the Tories: refuse to turn up for the State Opening of Parliament on Wednesday. Seriously. Do not turn up, but tell the government to go and boil its collective head.
Things have really got that bad. Can a no-confidence motion be far off?
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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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