Samizdata

It is entirely my fault. Because I have failed to read the Dave Barry blog as regularly as I should, I can only now tell you of the link to this crucial news story, published as long ago as last Saturday:

Stressing hygiene and health, it showed various state-approved short hairstyles including the “flat-top crew cut,” “middle hairstyle,” “low hairstyle,” and “high hairstyle” – variations from one to five centimetres in length.

The programme allowed men aged over 50 seven centimetres of upper hair to cover balding.

It stressed the “negative effects” of long hair on “human intelligence development”, noting that long hair “consumes a great deal of nutrition” and could thus rob the brain of energy.

Good to see that comb-overs will still be allowed, within reasonable limits.

A second, and unprecedented, TV series this winter showed hidden-camera style video of “long-haired” men in various locations throughout Pyongyang.

In a break with North Korean TV’s usual approach, the programme gave their names and addresses, and challenged the fashion victims directly over their appearance.

The North Korean media normally reserves the reporting of names of its citizens to exemplary individuals who show high communist virtues.

Typical media. Why can they not show good news, instead of harping on about bad stuff all the time?

“No matter how good the clothes, if one does not wear tidy shoes, one’s personality will be downgraded.”

For party papers such as Nodong Sinmun, the struggle against foreign and anti-communist influence is being fought out in the arena of personal appearance.

“People who wear other’s style of dress and live in other’s style will become fools and that nation will come to ruin,” it says.

Some people evidently do have long hair in North Korea, despite the danger of their personalities being downgraded, and the nation definitely is coming to ruin. But might they not be confusing correlation with causation?

Personally I suspect that this robbed North Korea of a lot more energy than long hair does.

And the North Korean government campaign to stamp out smoking has apparently not worked very well, so I expect long hair in North Korea to go on being an official worry for some time yet.

One cannot help but feel humbled before the violence of nature. The tiniest of twitches within the crust of our planet and thousands, tens of thousands or even millions die with barely time enough for a prayer.

All of us must face the question: “How should a planetary civilization of free people deal with events on this scale?” What do we as libertarians have as an answer to human misery on this level?

I know some will shrug their shoulders and say “people chose to live there”, “it should be handled by an insurance pool” because it is the “responsibility of everyone there to be fully insured” … as if people could get or afford it in areas like this which only recently have clawed their way far enough up the hierarchy of values to even know such things exist. I am not suggesting an answer. I have none. I am at a loss.

It was easier a few decades ago. Horrendous natural disasters happened in far away places to strange and alien people. They had nothing to do with us, no connection to our daily lives. Now we see real people in real time;
people who no longer seem the least bit alien; who may be related to the wife of friend’s son or the next door neighbor or friends of many years standing at a favoured resort. Given the massive amount of business and vacation travel in today’s world, it might well be one’s own sibling, parent, spouse or child laying dead on that no longer faraway beach.

It is difficult verging on the impossible to feel distant from the horror we see on television. I will not be surprised if the final toll tops 250,000: a quarter million souls. As horrifying as this number may be, it is by no means the worst nature can dish out.

Some day Yellowstone Park will go up. The entire park is, after all, a caldera that blows sky high every now and again. When next it happens, much of the American West will die. Denver and other cities will not look like human disaster areas. They will lie invisible hundreds of feet somewhere beneath thousands upon thousands of square miles of volcanic ash. Denver will become the Mile Under City.

There is a deadly fault near St Louis. A century and a half ago New Madrid was the site of perhaps the largest earthquake recorded in US history. It mostly shook trees, scared vast clouds of Passenger Pigeons into flight and annoyed the bears. No one knows when it will slip again. It is not difficult to imagine hundreds of thousands of Americans dead in an unprepared Midwest.

Then there is the disaster to rule them all. Short of the once in a hundred million year Dinosaur killer, the worst I am aware of is the Canary Islands landslide scenario. Some believe every once in ten millenia or so half a mountain slides off into the sea there. An Isle of Mann dropped into the Pond. Some scientists think there are signs of shifting already (others do not), and that perhaps we are closer to the next catastrophe than the previous. If such did occur, the resulting mega-tsunami would wipe out the Carribean islands and lay waste to the entire East Coast of the United States for tens of miles inland.

There are not many truly safe places on this living planet of ours. The next disaster might be bigger… and closer to home. Give whatever help you can as you might one day find yourself relying on the kindness of strangers.

The UK Earth Quake Appeal is reachable at 0870-606-0900. You can also give online.

The tsunami disaster in Asia appears to have spawned something of a pissing contest in the West:

The US plans to increase by 10-fold – to $350m – its contribution to help the survivors of the Indian Ocean tsunami.

The largest pledge so far was made just before talks between senior US and UN figures on co-ordinating aid efforts.

HMG may now be forced to raise its own bid. And the French. And the Germans, And the Japanese. And the Australians. And then the Americans will feel obliged to up the ante again in this unseemly ‘my-foreign-aid-dick-is-bigger-than-yours’ antler-lock.

And people call me cynical!

It has now been twenty years since the release of chemicals at a Union Carbide plant in the Indian city of Bhopal killed thousands of people, and today I heard that Dow (which took over Union Carbide three years ago) has announced an multi billion aid package.

With all the anti-American and anti-big business stuff in the media it is hard to get at the facts of the case. But the following are the facts as I understand them. If I am mistaken I am open to correction. I have no great love for the business model of ownerless corporations (or rather enterprises where most of the shares are owed by institutions), but some counter balance to the tide of abuse in the media seems to be in order.

Union Carbide built the plant because of the taxes on imports then in place in India, it did not build the plant in order to avoid following American safety standards of production.

Due to the regulations of the “Permit Raj” the plant was under the control of an Indian subsidiary of Union Carbide and the American parent company had little control over day to day operation of the plant.

The local State government went back on promises not to allow people to squat near to the plant – this may have increased casualties.

A Union Carbide investigation of the terrible incident reported that it may have been caused by sabotage and that the person responsible for the sabotage may have been a local employee (not an American at all).

Union Carbide paid, in full, the damages awarded by an Indian court.

Union Carbide officials have tried to avoid visiting the site because when the President of the company did so he was arrested, and was only able to return the United States by ‘skipping bail’. It was fear, not cruelty, that kept them away.

After the terrible incident the local State government took over the site and this site is still in a terrible state to this day. It is in the interests of local politicians and officials to blame ‘American big business’ in order to cover up their own failure to clean up the site in the many years they have controlled it.

I repeat that I am open to correction on any of the above. It would not greatly surprise me if Union Carbide were to blame (as I have said I am not a great lover of ownerless corps), but that is not the situation as I understand it.