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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The only way to view the present, imploding Labour government as it fights over the cash-for-peerages issue, is like a bunch of street rats at each others’ throats. This story in the Sunday Telegraph states that Tony Blair is willing to let one of his top cronies and fund-raisers, Lord Levy, take the hit for the scandal.
In many ways, what strikes me as so distinctive about this government and its ministers is that the big bust-ups, the big fights, were not on issues of principle. At least the Tories, for all their manifest faults, fell out over things like the euro and the Maastricht Treaty, which were serious, major issues. But then the Tories were once a grown-up party, with grown-up people in it like Margaret Thatcher, Geoffrey Howe and Nigel Lawson. Say what you like about these personages, but their rows were over issues of major substance.
It seems an awfully long time ago.
I had the pleasure of meeting U.S. blogger Stephen Green, of the excellently entitled Vodkapundit, a few months ago at a party in London. Stephen has been ill, lost a lot of weight, and I must say I got quite concerned when he stopped posting. He now explains what has been going on. It looks as if the fella is going to be all right, which is terrific news for him and his wife and child. Feel free to nip over to his site and give him your best wishes.
I am looking forward to the Colorado Scribe posting up more of those cocktail recipes again. Mine’s a gin and tonic.
Considering that investment bankers at places like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are paid the sort of money that sounds like a respectable cricket score, economics writer Arnold Kling asks the question: why is the supply of people to do this job not rising in response to a very juicy lump of money? It is a good question to ask. For the sort of money on offer, even a maths dunce like your humble scribe might want to learn to do the job and start figuring out the the clever-dick arts of hedge funds, credit derivatives and leveraged buyouts. So why is the supply not rising? I think some of this may be caused by a lack of talented folk coming out of our education system, but that cannot really explain it over the long-term. It may be that getting the level of experience to do these jobs is quite high, raising the scarcity and hence the massive rewards. Of course when these guys get fired for failing to perform, this rarely bothers people who get upset about the big salaries.
These guys have a rather, er, different take on the matter.
I am just about to go out to nail some final Christmas shopping but if anyone is feeling all warm and generous, they can always buy me one of these. I promise I will send a very fulsome thankyou card.
“Stunning” does not even come close to describing how magnificent the new Aston Martin is. No wonder the makers of the Bond movies keep going back to the marque. Isn’t rampant capitalism just great?
P.J. O’ Rourke has a book on Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. This looks like the ideal Christmas gift to give someone who might be undecided politically, has an open mind and can be moved by the wisdom of a man who persuades with wit rather than the blunderbuss of masses of statistics or over-preachy bromides. I must say I really enjoyed O’Rourke’s little gem “Eat the Rich”, which is still available and which came out a few years ago. He may have veered away from the uber-hilarious form of books like Parliament of Whores, Republican Party Reptile or the Batchelor Home Companion, but it is good to see that O’Rourke is still writing and making people think and laugh at the same time. His is a special and all-too-rare talent.
This is bloody clever:
Italcementi, which spent 10 years developing its TX Active, said the building material is capable of reducing urban pollution by more than 40 percent, the Italian news agency ANSA reported Tuesday.
Tests on a road near Milan showed TX Active cut the level of nitrogen dioxide and carbon monoxide by as much as 65 percent.
I came across this story while browsing through the weekly magazine, The Business (which has been re-launched from its previous format of a Sunday newspaper). The story says that the cement’s amazing properties were discovered quite by accident and emerged from nanotechnology research undertaken by an EU-funded project (good grief, something positive via the EU, Ed). The Business article says that the photocatalytic cement building materials can get rid of up to 80 percent of air pollution.
The applications of the new kinds of materials technologies coming out from the worlds of nanotech and beyond are legion. I particularly like the idea that concrete, which normally turns a sort of gunky, greyish colour in Britain’s damp climate, could stay a more pristine colour thanks to stuff like this. One of the reasons why so much modern architecture is so crap is not just the basic shapes of the buildings but the materials they are composed of.
I wonder whether it gets rid of grafitti, though.
(Update: another story on the subject)
One of the reasons why I like the idea of a “flat tax” is that, by sweeping away all the existing loopholes, it removes a whole group of people who have a vested interest in pushing for special treatement from the Inland Revenue and instead creates a simpler system that is far easier to run, less distortive of economic activity. As a libertarian, of course, my main aim is to see the overall burden come down rather than be flatter; the flatness of the tax code is not, ultimately, as important as its weight.
One of the groups that have managed to chisel a tax break out of finance minister Gordon Brown is the domestic film industry. Apparently, the End of Civilisation As We Know It may possibly be arriving soon if we no longer make movies in England. It is all tosh, of course. Many British actors, directors, producers, technicians and photographers work all over the world, very successfully too. While financed with U.S. money and so forth, many of the biggest hits in recent years have had strong British themes, such as the Harry Potter series, and even the latest James Bond movie.
Boris Johnson has a nice article demonstrating the absurdity of trying to define what is a “British” film for the purposes of qualifying for tax treatment. Just get rid of these loopholes and focus on cutting taxes across the board, Boris. And please do inform your statist-minded Tory leader, David Cameron, about that aim.
The other day I wrote about the charms of Suffolk, that county in East Anglia in which I was brought up. A place famous for gentle, flattish countryside, nice buildings, coastal scenery, fine beer and a once-very-good football team (Ipswich Town FC won the FA Cup in 1978 and the European UEFA Cup in 1981 in the glory years when the team was managed by Sir Bobby Robson).
Alas, Ipswich is now likely to be known some time for very different, appalling reasons.
Now is not the time to really go into much analysis of the crimes themselves. My heart goes out to the friends and families of the victims and like most people, I hope the piece of scum that carried out these killings is quickly brought to justice. While I have my doubts about using the death penalty in a world when so much of our Common Law has been damaged by stupid governments, it is hard not to feel sympathy for despatching such a lowlife rather than leaving him – I assume it is a he – to rot in jail for years at the taxpayer’s expense.
The victims in this case are described as prostitutes. Blogger Tim Worstall has thoughts about the nexus of drug use and prostitution and, being the pro-liberty guy he is, reckons that the women who ply this trade would be safer if prostitution was legalised. I agree (I had quite a joust with an authortarian if probably well-meaning chap by the name of Martin on Tim’s comment thread). I think that a person who sells his or her sexual favours for cash is entitled to do so with consenting adults and it is no business of the state to say otherwise. The harms that people usually associate with prostitution stem from the fact that it is often illegal and thus controlled by organised criminals, many of them drug-pushers as well. Legalising it, and taking prostitution out of a legal twilight zone is not a cure-all for the ills some people associate with it, but it would reduce problems, I think, such as sexually transmitted diseases, and perhaps reduce the sort of horrors that we have seen in the Ipswich area. Of course, if this monster strikes again and this time attacks someone from a very different set of circumstances, then the debate will shift.
This terrible saga also prompts me to wonder what could and should be done to encourage people to learn and practice self defence, but that is a whole topic in itself and I don’t have the time right now to explore it, but I am sure that commenters will want to think about it. I’d be interested to know if there are comparable recent incidents from other parts of the world and what happened subsequently. Send in any examples.
Perceptive article on the local area by Times columnist Libby Purves.
(Update: fixed silly typo in original).
I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.
– Winston S. Churchill, war leader, soldier, journalist, historian, painter and amateur pig-farmer.
The Daily Telegraph’s Charles Moore has good and important things to say about how the Armed Forces are viewed these days in Britain. He cites several examples of how soldiers, sailors or airmen returning home from a tour of duty frequently feel completely unvalued, sometimes despised, by the home population.
To a certain extent, this has to be placed in historical context. Since the end of compulsory military service in the early 1960s and the end of the Cold War, the forces have shrunk, so a smaller proportion of us are likely to encounter people who are serving in the forces. I know a couple of people in the RAF and my father was a navigator in the 1950s – on aircaft with spiffing names like Meteors, Javelins and Venoms – but many of us do not. I wanted to follow my old man’s footsteps but I developed a small defect in my eyesight in my late teens so the prospect of Johnathan Pearce at the controls of a Typhoon was zero (probably to much relief to you readers). The idea of having a career in the armed forces is something that occurs to very few of us these days. None of the youngsters I know would be remotely interested in joining up. The pay is not attractive compared with what one could earn in other walks of life and the whole catch of travelling around the world, meeting interesting people and subsequently killing them does not appeal to a generation that can backpack around the globe on a cheap flight anyway. And the killing stuff is clearly not popular. Maybe the impact of television, culture and politics has sapped the military ethos. This is a good thing mostly, but it clearly comes at a cost in the supply of motivated personnel.
Moore’s article concludes with a plug for a very fine charity that helps support our services. Without apology, I recommend those so minded to donate something. May I also suggest this RAF Benevolent Fund site as a place that people can visit. Other branches of the forces have similar bodies looking after people who have served and now need some help.
These words of Rudyard Kipling, the great poet for the British Army, are nice:
“Troopin’, troopin’, give another cheer –
Ere’s to English women and a quart of English beer.
The Colonel an’ the Regiment an’ all who’ve got to stay,
Gaw’s Mercy Strike ’em gentle! Whoop! w’re goin’ ‘ome to-day.
We’re goin’ ‘ome, w’re goin’ ‘ome,
Our ship is at the shore,
An’ you must pack your ‘aversack,
For we won’t come back no more.
Ho, don’t you grieve for me,
My lovely Mary-Ann!
For I’ll marry you yit on a foup’ny bit
As a time-expired man.
(From the poem, Troopin’).
EU Referendum has a long and detailed article on the problems the British Army is having with its equipment in the Middle East and the lessons that could and should be learned from other forces, such as the Canadians. The EU Ref. blog has become a regular read for me, and it specialises on two or three consistent themes and sticks to them solidly. You will not get closely-argued analysis of the armed forces like this unless you buy a specialist book or attend a lecture by military historians such as John Keegan. First class stuff all round.
Via the Adam Smith Institute blog I came across this excellent essay over at the LewRockwell site about South Park. Definitely worth a read. Of course it is not the first time that the outrageous but wonderfully sharp series has been noted for its libertarian, anti-puritan content. Blogger Andrew Sullivan even coined the phrase – I think – South Park Republicans. I doubt that the makers of the series would want to be seen dead with many modern self-styled conservatives, and I would love Parker and Stone to have a go at our own benighted David Cameron’s Tories. There was a whole book on the subject by Brian Anderson called South Park Conservatives, which I quite liked, although it had some flaws. Reason magazine had a recent nice article about the characters.
Of course, arguably PJ O’Rourke was ahead of them all with his Republican Party Reptiles, which is essentially a libertarian credo in most respects. The nearest we have in Britain to such a celebration of brash material wealth and fun, irreverence towards do-gooders of all forms is motoring journalist Jeremy Clarkson.
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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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