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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It is a great shame to see Randy Cunningham, a fighter ace who did sterling work over North Vietnam, descend into the cesspool of corruption like so many before him. My opinions of the man were already diminished by his blinkered views regarding the excesses of Serbian nationalism but to see this old warrior revealed as utterly corrupt is still deeply saddening.
It is equally revolting to see Democrats act as if this is the special preserve of the Republican Party rather than an endemic feature of the whole process of which they too are very much a part. Taxpayers for Common Sense has some rather more non-partisan views:
Keith Ashdown, of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a watchdog group, said Cunningham’s guilty plea hurts both parties. “There are very few things that I read that kick me in the gut. This is beyond my wildest guess of how bad it actually is — how bad, how long and how nobody knew about it,” said Ashdown. “I don’t think Democrats or Republicans win on this. It basically makes people detest Congress even more and deters voter turnout.”
In truth the only way to reduce corruption in high places is to have less high places and which party is on top makes very little difference.
Are the political opponents of George Bush, who are advocating cut-and-run in Iraq, about to take the attrition war there (which by any objective measure the USA cannot possibly lose on the battlefield) and turn gradual military advantage into decisive political defeat?
Discuss.
I am certain it comes as little surprise to any of our readers that politicians are, by nature, liars. Still, it is a bit of fun to see them blatently caught at it, especially when the lying is potentially putting the lives of their own citizenry at risk.
This Republican film clip shows the moving lips and indeed proves our belief in a multi-party system being the best thing next to a no-party individualist system. Competition makes the antagonists apply resources to counter 1984 style rewrites of history,
Of all the Democrats shown, only the Clintons are truthful enough to admit and some extent hold to their past sentiments. They represent the most honest and upstanding individuals the Democratic leadership has to offer.
Take that as you may…
Yes, you read that correctly. And moreover he states that presidents do not create jobs, entrepreneurs do… Mister Bleeding Heart himself, Alan Frigging Alda! 
Follow the link and read the whole thing, I kid you not.
I am chastened as clearly I must reappraise my views of the man and repent a few of the things I may have said about him in the past. Any moment now I fully expect to see a flock of pigs flying past my window!
Yesterday I got into conversation with two sibling members of my family, both of whom are opposed to the US invasion/liberation of Iraq. One is (approximately) an environmentalist, the other is (precisely speaking) a UKIPper, but both are agreed in opposing the war and Britain’s involvement in it. I am cautiously and pessimistically supportive, but am not sure. I hope Mark Steyn is right about it, but fear that he may not be.
Anyway, an hypothesis about the state of US public opinion surfaced, as interesting hypotheses will when people who disagree, and who hence bring varied ideas and attitudes to the table, but who wish to remain civil with one another, as I and my siblings do.
For the last few years, the Left in the USA has been saying: It’s all about oil, it’s all about oil. Now for many Americans, and for most people outside America, fighting a war for mere oil is evil. But what if lots of Americans hear that this war is all about oil, and are pleased? But what if the dime has now finally dropped that actually this war is NOT all about oil?
Could that be what Middle America is getting nervous about? For as long as they were convinced that it was all about oil, they were content. That is our kind of war. Simple, limited, clear, selfish. All the things you want, and not like Vietnam at all. But now that it is dawning on them that this really is about “democracy” and such like, for that exact reason they are getting fidgety. Will it be worth it? When will it end? Where will it end? etc.
It would be entertaining to think that the American Left have been the most energetic de facto supporters of President Bush because of what they regarded as their fiercest criticism of him, but that now that the Left is being defeated in the argument about the true nature and true purpose of the war by the war’s most energetic supporters, support for that war is, as a direct result, eroding.
One should probably not be looking for entertainment in such serious things, but, entertainment aside, is this not a rather interesting way of looking at it? I am sure that this theory does not apply to all American supporters or ex-supporters of the war. But to some, maybe?
No links in this I am afraid. I do not recall hearing anyone else saying anything quite like this, although some surely have.
I am in New York. I try to visit this great city every now and then, although as it happens I have not been here since 2000. Besides the fact that the skyline of this city has been defiled since then, it is still the same place, although it seems to get richer and cleaner every time I visit.
My first trip here was in 1991. I was 22 years old at the time, and before I went I remember my mother being slightly scared for me. At that point New York had a reputation for being a somewhat rough and dangerous place. It had perhaps deserved that reputation in the 1970s, but by 1991 it was not especially fair. When I walked the streets of Manhattan I quickly discovered that New York was a fabulous city, but my first experience was an odd one. I arrived at Newark Airport, collected my luggage and headed for the bus stop outside. However, my progress was impeded by the fact that the dead body of a large black man was lying in a pool of blood at the bottom of one of the escalators. There were policemen standing nearby, preventing other people from coming too close.
I do not know how this man died. My best guess is that he simply fell while on the escalator and hit his head. Howevever, my mind was filled with visions of airport shootouts. The thought “What is this place, and what the fuck am I doing here?” went through my mind. I cowered a little.
I then got the bus into Manhattan, found the hostel where I was staying, and had a great time. The city was a litttle grimy, and there were one or two rough neighbourhoods, but it was in truth a magnificent place.
Since then the city has got a lot richer and more gentrified, and (at least in Manhattan) the rough neighborhoods do not seem quite so rough as before. On Saturday I wandered into Hell’s Kitchen, famous for being a tough location, recorded in bad movies such as this one.
But of course its proximity to the important locations of midtown means that a certain amount of gentrification may have taken place. That or the long time residents have taken a liking for politically correct lettuce leaves.
Having roughed such a dangerous place, I retired to a nearby restaurant, where I had some Provencale food washed down with an excellent premier cru Burgundy. (Although the food was excellent, the restaurant felt nothing like France. Everything about it was obviously New York, from the size of the portions to the accents to the volume of the diners to the decor). Okay, at that point I got the “kitchen” part. Hell was still eluding me.
If you go a long way uptown, then yes, some places are not quite as gentrified as this. But they are perfectly fine, and in terms of safety New York feels these days more like Tokyo than the dangerous, feared place that people in foreign countries had heard terrible stories about during my childhood.
Just over a year ago I spent a very happy few days in northern California, spending one very long and pleasant day in the state’s Napa Valley wine region. The region boasts some of the best wines in the world, including the now-famous wineries of Robert Mondavi. Mondavi’s wines caused a global sensation in the trade when, during a “blind tasting” in the early 1970s, wine critics rated his produce a notch above the competition from more exalted premises in Bordeaux and Burgundy. The horror!
This article very nicely draws out how the challenge of New World wines from California, Chile, Argentina (a magnificent producer of wine), South Africa, New Zealand and Australia has led to a fairly grumpy response from the traditional centres. This is perhaps understandable. The French produced some of the finest wines of all time, with only a bit of competition from the flowery Hocks and Moselles from Germany and the likeable Riojas in Spain and a few good ones from Italy. About 20-plus years ago, you could walk into a supermarket and choose from only a relatively limited range of wines, much of it fairly basic plonk. Globalisation has put some of the world’s most far-flung wine producers into the reach of Joe Public.
All we need now is a similar global “race to the top” in the production of effective hangover cures.
Regular readers may recall that I supported Bush for President as the “least bad” alternative. Certainly his domestic agenda was nothing for a libertarian to crow about, but on most issues his opposition was at least as bad.
Bush is certainly doing what he can these days to put the “bad” in least bad.
One of the areas where this libertarian could confidently point to Bush as better was on tax policy. He cut taxes, and his Democratic opposition was all about raising them. Unfortunately, the Bush administration is now floating tax “reform” that includes limitation of the mortgage deduction, a great way to raise revenue and disrupt the economy by assuring a hard landing from our current mortgage-fuleded credit bubble.
While the usual Democratic lament when faced with the Republican budget agenda has been some combination of “they aren’t spending enough” (the Dems wanted to spend more on the brobdingnagian presription drug benefit) and “they aren’t raising taxes to pay for this”, the Republican spending spree has gotten so far out of control that the normally rock-solid claim that the Dems would spend more is getting harder to make.
And finally, we come to his nomination of crony Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. Now, the reasons for disappointment in this pick are multiple.
First, Bush blinked on the diversity/affirmative action front. You may recall that his first pick to replace Sandra Day O’Connor was a man, John Roberts, a nice thumb-in-the-eye for the diversity crowd. However, Roberts was shifted over to fill Rehnquist’s seat, and Bush explicitly told his crew to find a woman to replace O’Connor, pandering to the worst kind of identity politics.
And he apparently did so based on his confidence that she would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, the decision creating a right to abortion in the US. Now, as a matter of Constitution law, Roe is a terrible decision, and should be overturned pronto. However, there is every reason to believe that Bush has sold a seat on the Supreme Court, for a single vote on a single issue, to a woman who will be reliably statist and anti-Constitutional.
Harriet Miers is from Dallas, and the word here is that she is a pretty squishy liberal who found God (conveniently, just about the time that being an evangelical became a real entre into the Dallas power structure, but lets give her the benefit of the doubt on that). There is no reason whatsoever to believe that she won’t join the anti-individual rights wing of the Court, and some pretty good indications that she will. From what I hear from people who have reason to know, she is a very conventional thinker whose strengths have always been political, not intellectual, and who has never shown a shred of political courage in her life.
She is likely to be very much in the mold of Sandra Day O’Connor and David Souter, in other words, with the occasional anti-gay and anti-abortion vote thrown in.
Another opportunity blown. Humbug.
So is GWB really facing ‘rebellion‘ by conservatives over his choice of nominee to the Supreme Court? It has long puzzled me why he has been cut so much slack for so long given that his conservative credentials were never very strong to begin with. I guess just not being Bill Clinton was enough for the GOP’s supporters to stomach his significant expansion of Big Government and clear lack of any interest in trying to revive the squandered Reagan legacy.
But is this the straw that breaks the camels back or just a storm in a media teacup? Are there really enough people in the GOP willing to derail his latest nominee to the Supreme Court on ideological grounds and do they think there is any chance of them getting someone more to their liking from a Big Government statist like George Bush Jr.? Is this ‘outrage’ on the right going to make a difference? I will be curious see how this is really going to play out.
It has been claimed by the BBC that George Bush has said he was “instructed by God to invade Iraq and Afghanistan”, not “inspired by his Christian beliefs” mind you, actually “instructed”, presumably via some sort of celestial Red Telephone in the Oval Office. Now he may or may not have actually said that (the BBC is rather prone to run with whatever story fits its world view), but I can certainly believe he might have said those things.
As the guy is a practicing Christian, it is to be expected that the G word is something that might come easy to his lips. Now I am all in favour of the adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan but I really do wonder if he has any idea how utterly bonkers that sort of thing sounds to non-believers such as myself?
Do not get me wrong, I am not saying he should deny his faith if he thinks he has a personal relationship with God. If that is how he sees things, why should he not say so? I realise than many of my utterances about liberty and the world generally strike many of a different bent as equally bizarre. But I am well aware how negatively my remarks are often received even though I may not actually care a great deal… but at least I know.
But I wonder if GWB actually has the slightest idea how he sounds to some people when he invoked his deity in such a manner? Is the President of the United States really saying he hears voices in his head and acts on what he hears?
Just curious.
I must admit that at some stages I thought that Andrew Sullivan had slightly lost the plot in his apparent obsession with the torture issue concerning the treatment of detainees in Iraq and elsewhere. At one stage Sullivan seemed to take upon himself the task of scolding other bloggers (notably Glenn Reynolds) for not buying into his argument. Well, this story today suggests that Sullivan has been right to bang on about the issue and to champion the cause of people in the military looking to clean house. I think this also counts as a genuine victory for a blogger and shows the power of this medium. I don’t doubt, for example, that Senator McCain and his allies read blogs like Sullivan’s.
In case anyone thinks this is some sort of anti-American or anti-Iraq war issue, it is not. I want to finish the job properly in Iraq and let it be done with honour as well as competence. The U.S. Senate just took a step in that direction.
It is about three months since the dreadful ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court, the Kelo ruling, authorising public authorities to grab people’s homes and businesses so that corporations – with political favours to grant, no doubt – can build big developments on the land and promise a big tax flow for the public purse. The battle is continuing to rage, even though some individual jurisdictions in the U.S. have passed laws trying to contain this monstrous use of what is called “eminent domain”.
It is well worth keeping a beady eye on this issue from here in Britain because so much of what happens in the legal and economic sphere in the U.S. tends to eventually hit our shores.
In the meantime, I continue to recommend this blog for regular updates on eminent domain, as well as the Institute for Justice, and this excellent book on property rights issues.
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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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