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]
I am glad that things look to have become a bit more peaceful in Northern Ireland.
Would I be correct in guessing that this settlement may be one of the good things to have emerged from 9/11? This would be a pleasing thought, given the grief that Britain and the USA seem to have made for themselves in Iraq, provided its truth will survive serious scrutiny.
What I have in mind is that following 9/11 the USA took its first truly serious look at IRA terrorism, voters as well as just terrorism experts, and all that sentimental and unthinking Oirish blarney support for the IRA, which had over the decades turned into real money and real weapons on a huge scale, no longer seemed like a harmless slice of electoral politics and suddenly looked like a seriously bad idea. (I recall thinking as soon as the Twin Towers came down that the IRA would not like this.)
For, no matter what concessions have been gouged out of the North Ireland Unionists, and even though nobody directly involved in this settlement would dream of saying it out loud for fear of upsetting the new applecart that has now been bodged together, this surely means that the IRA has lost. For the time being anyway. They wanted Northern Ireland to be detached from the UK and to become attached to the Republic of Ireland, but this has not happened.
Or is this just a ceasefire? And will the IRA, Hezbollah style, merely use the settlement and the governmental privileges it gives them to prepare their next offensive? Presumably this remains the Unionist fear. Only time and lots of it will tell, but to an ignorant outsider such as south of England me, this seems real. If so, then the inevitable self-congratulatory noises emerging from the government, and the general media acclamation for the deal, would appear to be justified.
AA Gill, the Scottish columnist and restaurant reviewer, has always come across in my eyes as a man who wears chips on his shoulders like military epaulettes, which for an upper middle class lad seems a bit odd. He does not like the English much, does he? Even so, read the article, as it contains some painful truths as well as some unfair bile. He makes the point that the English/British are not always great adopters of life in New York. I have been to the city many times and saw this clubby sort of behaviour a few times. We Brits do not seem to realise how rude we can strike Americans. When I read of Americans being cut short at dinner parties or insulted by Brit tourists, I cringe, even though I tell myself that I am not responsible for the behaviour of my fellow countrymen and women. I feel much the same way when I overhear some idiot in Paris or Milan refusing to speak the local language and assuming that everyone speaks English rather than French or Italian.
I would be interested to know what Jim Bennett, the Anglosphere man, makes of this sort of behavioural friction. It may be just a matter of Gill being an arsehole. But he may also have a point.
“Where is Karl Rove?” is one of the things the only member of the jury I watched talking to journalists said the jury in the trial of Lewis Libby talked about (although, of course, he stated that they spent most of their time on proper examination of the case).
First some information: And information presented to you (dear readers) by someone who did not support the decision to go into Iraq in 2003.
The man who leaked the fact that Mrs Wilson worked for the CIA was Richard Armitage of the State Department, not Mr Libby, Karl Rove, the Vice President, the President – or the man at the local shop.
Mrs Wilson was an employee – not an agent of the CIA.
Saddam Hussain did try to get uranium from Niger, along with various other places. So the claims of Mr Wilson that the Administration was telling lies about Saddam were wrong. Whether being wrong would concern Mr Wilson (a giver of money to the 2000 Gore campaign) I can not know for sure – but I would be astonished if it did. → Continue reading: “Where is Karl Rove?” : The trial of Lewis Libby
I have been following the Al Gore “carbon offset” controversy with great interest, and if I can get my eight bosses off my neck will try to put up a post on it. However, it just occurred to me that, based on the Gore methodology of buying carbon offsets, my carbon footprint is probably about to go negative.
The reason being, I should be acquiring a parcel of land in North Texas within the next few weeks. Said parcel consists of some meadows, but mostly of youngish post oaks and miscellaneous brush. Heaven, to this country boy, but it seems to me that, if Al Gore can get carbon credit for paying someone else to plant some trees, why shouldn’t I get carbon credit for actually owning well over a hundred acres of growing trees, each of them busily sequestrating carbon?
I should soon be in the rather unusual position of being able to (a) express my contempt for a certain quasi-religious crusade while (b) meeting and exceeding its requirements to be one of the Elect.
And all while driving my SUV back and forth across the Texas landscape! Is this a great planet, or what?
Paul Joyal, an outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin has been shot in the USA. Does this remind you of anything?
Of course it could just be another random street crime, but if not and this turns out to be another (hopefully just attempted) assassination of an overseas political enemy living in the west, then it is clearly well past time to start loudly demanding the state does one of the few legitimate things it taxes us for… protecting us all from the armed servants of a foreign government.
Could it be time to start threatening Putin in the most literal way? If he keeps killing people in the west then not only should Russian embassies be closed forthwith, those expensive security services we pay for should start motivating the Russian security services to behave via whatever means come to mind. I can certainly think of a few.
I will watch with interest to see what information comes out about this case. It could, after all, have just been a robbery.
Had the defendant actually murdered the children whose images have (presumably) given him so much furtive pleasure, would he be any worse off now?
The US Supreme Court has refused to hear an appeal by a high school teacher from Arizona sentenced to 200 years in jail for possessing child pornography…
If the 52-year-old had been tried in a federal court or lived elsewhere he would have received a lighter sentence.
190 years tops. With good behaviour he could have been out and about in, say, just over a century.
Indeed, the prosecutor had asked for a 340-year sentence but the trial judge imposed the minimum of 10 years for each of 20 images – to be served consecutively for a total of 200 years without the possibility of probation, early release or pardon.
So he gets what amounts, for all practical purposes, to a death sentence for possessing vile and twisted photographs. I wonder if there is a historical parallel here? Or does it set one?
George Soros, a man who can annoy with some of his less-than-brilliant pronouncements on public affairs, nevertheless is an investor of genius. Well, at least he was in the 80s and early 90s when, purely out of glorious avarice, of course, he helped push Britain out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in September, 1992. This event irreversibly damaged the reputation for competence of the then-Tory government of John Major and Chancellor Norman Lamont. Soros’s fortunes in the 1990s waxed, although he failed to exploit fully the 1990s dotcom boom and now prefers to travel the world dispensing advice. He is loathed by many on the right for his support for the Democrats. I saw him give testimony to a Treasury Select Commitee in the House of Commons a few years ago and felt that this was a brilliant financier who, like many men who are brilliant in one area, can be often rather silly in other areas (Einstein springs to mind).
But the beauty of open markets is, that even if you disagree with the views of a person, you can still trade with that person and make each other better off. Voltaire, when he travelled around England in the 18th Century, marvelled at the London Stock Exchange and how people of all religions could and did transact with one another. Well, Soros, a lefty financier, has just made the sort of deal that is likely to send those charming folk of the Democratic Undergound off the edge. Tee-hee.
225 years ago today Parliament voted a resolution to end the war and grant the colonies independence. A month later Lord North faced a vote of no confidence and stepped down.
It seems to me any old place can declare independence, it is when your would-be rulers accept it that matters.
We’ve had experience in the past – the New York City subways come to mind – with businesses that began as conventional, for-profit corporations, and, for one reason or another, were later rendered unprofitable while still being viewed as essential services. It’s time to apply some creative thinking to newspapers and, for that matter, to serious journalism in other media. Then we need to convince Americans that they should pay attention to it – and pay for it.
Convince as in force people who do not want newspapers to pay for them nevertheless.
I do not know who Steven Rattner is (here are a few clues. His wife is apparently a fundraiser for the Democrats). Nor do I know what the Quadrangle Group, LLC is, of which he is managing principal, whatever that may mean (again, some clues here). But he seems like a fool. The entire essay of which the above recommendation for plunder is the concluding paragraph is about how Americans are becoming less interested in “the news”, and more interested in other things. Which is why, actually, they are less willing to pay for the news than they used to be.
It is also about why tradesmen do not need newspapers any longer to reach potential customers, which is why tradesmen are less willing to pay for newspaper readerships.
That ought to lead to a simple recommendation to potential investors in newspapers. Do not invest in newspapers. Let people tell each other the news for free, for instance by people writing and reading blogs. If some still want the news, then let them read news blogs, which gather together what various different bloggers think is the news.
But Mr Rattner seems to love newspapers. So, seeing no profit in newspapers as a business, he switches to the second-last resort of the scoundrel, a bare-faced claim that the taxpayer owes him and his friends a living. Having ceased to be attractive to mere readers, newspapers must be transformed, by some kind of political hocus pocus, into “essential services”. Like the BBC, if you please. And when all that falls on deaf ears, he will presumably go with the cosmeticised version of the same claim, about how taxpayers should pay for newspapers despite not wanting to read them anymore, because this is their patriotic duty.
Sometimes you see a set of numbers and they really make you sit up and gasp:
Last year, more than 350 companies went public in Europe, selling $86
billion of stock, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. In the U.S.,
235 companies raised $48 billion in IPOs. In 1999, 507 companies went
public in the U.S., selling a combined $63.93 billion of stock. Not one of the 10
largest stock issues of 2006 was listed in New York.
The continuing story of Samizdata people meeting in the USA in order to conspire, drink, shoot and eat…
The poison of the evening was both delicious and lethal in equal measure, which eventually necessitated…
…the development of some innovative instant sober-up techniques…
… which proved surprisingly popular
The following day, we took out our hangovers on the surrounding environment…
…and scared local wildlife by creeping around and pointing basters at them…
…large quantities of .40 were expended at metal objects…
…although we did not end up eating a local turkey, we had a sublime lamb dinner
I am not a believer but if there is indeed a ‘happy hunting ground’ in the hereafter, I think it will look something going shooting with your close friends followed by a meal of epic quality.
There has been a lot of talk about ex President Carter getting a ‘grammy’ for the audio verison of his latest it-is-all-the-fault-of-the-Jews book. And certainly he was honoured in the company one might expect. The ‘Dixie Chicks’ were honoured with three awards in spite of their commercial decline (Bush bashing trumps anything else), as was a gentleman whose songs are largely about ‘niggerz’ and his practice of beating up his ‘Ho’.
The award ceremony was, as it happens, held on the 28th anniversary of the Iranian Revolution – an event that occurred after then President James Earl Carter sold out the Shah. I wonder how many in the audience noted the irony.
However, ex-President Carter is not alone. There seems to be a broader movement in the South (for some time considered generally the most conservative part of the United States) towards something that reminds me of the late 19th and early 20 century Populism.
The Populists sometimes operated as a party in their own right, and sometimes as a faction of the Democratic party in the South (after the end of Reconstruction the Republican party virtually ceased to exist in the Southern States – so a lot of politics was between factions of the Democratic party) against conservative ‘Bourbon’ Democrats.
The stock in trade of the Populists was hatred of big business, the rich, Roman Catholics and Jews.
Ex Senator John Edwards recently got into trouble for having two bloggers on his pay roll who specialized in obscene attacks on (for example) the Virgin Mary. Many were surprised that Mr Edwards did not fire these staffers – but he is no fool, and it not just a matter of fear of revenge from the left of the blogosphere if he did fire them.
As long as the attacks can be kept as anti-Catholic as opposed to anti-Christian he may be fine – indeed these attacks may even help him. Although he may be making a mistake, as the principle reason that his staffers hate Roman Catholics is the Catholic position on abortion – a position that many Protestants (and Orthodox Jews and some atheists and others) share. → Continue reading: President Carter and the return of the Southern Populists?
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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