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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One of the premier rent-seekers in the US, Jesse Jackson, appears to be off his game. Jesse has long run what amounts to a protection racket, in which he threatens to invoke the anti-discrimination laws and boycotts against any company that doesn’t pony up to one of his phony charities.
To take one gruesome example from the book: In 1981, Mr. Jackson struck up a “covenant” with Coca-Cola in which the company not only agreed to change overseas policies but, more to the point, provided profitable distributorships to black businessmen–including Mr. Jackson’s half-brother, Noah Robinson, later convicted of racketeering, drug trafficking and murder-by-hire.
However, Jesse has made a number of gaffes and missteps in recent years that may have undercut his little empire.
His shot at the membership policies of the Augusta National Golf Club had flown straight into a water hazard. His complaints about the jokes in the movie “Barbershop” were dismissed as raving. And it wasn’t so long ago that he was outed for his close and fruitful relations with a female staff member of his Citizenship Educational Fund, a scandal that occasioned a trip into the political wilderness that lasted most of a weekend. Finally, Kenneth Timmerman’s “Shakedown,” published last year, detailed his lucrative intimidation habits, with Mr. Jackson threatening charges of racism unless corporations adjusted their policies and gave “willingly” to various causes.
The sooner Jesse disappears from the public stage, the better off we will all be. Let’s hope that day is coming soon.
Mr Schwarzenegger has been avoiding stating his proposed policies, to reduce California’s debt mountain, in his play for the California state governorship role, and he’s had a public row with Warren Buffet, his economics adviser, on property taxes. But even if just for Friday entertainment value, check out these latest quotes:
“I feel the people of California have been punished enough. From the time they get up in the morning and flush the toilet they’re taxed.”
Zing!
“I teach my children not to spend more money than they have. That’s what I will teach Sacramento.”
Bosh!
Combine those sound-bites with some he delivered a few days ago:
“I am more comfortable with an Adam Smith philosophy than with Keynesian theory.”
Splat!
“I still believe in lower taxes — and the power of the free market.”
Yowzer!
Ok, until someone can actually nail him down on his policies, we must reserve judgement on the larger-than-life mega-star, especially as he keeps neatly side-stepping the really difficult questions on taxation with a “we can never say never” line. But if you retain even the slightest Churchillian belief that democracy is the least bad of all of the systems of government, things are becoming increasingly interesting in the Golden State.
And Mr Arnold “Arnie” Rimmer, of the future mining space ship Red Dwarf, is certainly getting plenty of newspaper headlines to cut out and keep, to impress all of his friends with!
Having just recovered from the shock of hearing about David Carr’s illegal tomato seeds, I’ve stumbled this morning across an even madder tax scam, this time originating from among our American friends in Seattle, in Washington State.
Apparently, and I’m still struggling to believe it, there’s a proposal to put a 10-cent coffee tax on every cup of espresso sold in the City of Seattle, to raise money for pre-school child care.
That’s Tax-tastic!
So what’s the alleged tax linkage between espresso coffee and pre-school child care? Linkage? Heck, we don’t need linkage. Here’s what John Burbank said, the man behind the proposed tax:
“I go into these places every day. One of the good things about Seattle is we love our coffee and we love our kids. So let’s make that connection.”
Has anyone reminded Mr Burbank that this is the land of the Boston Tea Party? I think someone should.
And while we’re waiting for the tax to go through, is Frasier available? I think I need a consultation to prevent early-onset total madness. The screens, please nurse. Quickly!
While I’m there in the recovery room, kids, you better watch out. One day, in the US, it’s a coffee tax. The next day, in the UK, it’s a Tetley Tea tax! Maybe those fine people in Boston won’t be the last ones to revolt over caffeine-based refreshments?
Blogger and Canadian writer Colby Cosh tells us why he is a libertarian in one of those don’t-know-whether-to-laugh-or-cry stories.
Yes, you read that right–an officer enforcing a health regulation ordered a club for recovering alcoholics to get a liquor license. But wait–it gets worse. The club’s application was turned down by the province.
Read, as the man says, the whole thing.
I was probably one of the first in Europe to hear about the US blackout. I’ve customers in Manhattan. One of them rang me in Belfast as soon as she determined not only her Upper West flat, but also her Chinatown server rack were both affected. She has a big UPS but no backup generator. It just isn’t feasible for a facility her size. I advised an immediate controlled shutdown.
It seems government officials were announcing “this wasn’t a terrorist incident” almost before people like my customer completed their emergency procedures. I found and still find this strange. It may well be true. It probably is true, but the haste to discount the possibility was unseemly.
Terrorism and sabotage are not necessarily spectacular events. It doesn’t take a bombing or an armed attack to bring down a power grid. In 1964 the East Coast power grid came down all by itself. It was due to a cascade of protective shutdowns after a “First Cause” failure. That may be the case this week as well, but we don’t know yet. A sudden reversal of power flow on the Lake Erie power loop occurred instants before the cascading failures began. That is sufficient information to tell us absolutely nothing.
Thus unarmed with facts, I will now sally forth into the vacuum of hard data and suggest some attack scenarios.
The Saboteur. Someone with appropriate knowledge may have penetrated a targeted power facility and simply thrown a few switches. A “mole” at a power station would be best, but power stations are not Fort Knoxen. A trained agent could probably get in and out of some “weakest link” facility somewhere without being detected.
Does anyone remember the incident of November 11, 2001 (see Charleston Daily Mail, “Guard Chases Men Near Power Plant”) during which a security guard slugged a person attempting to enter power plant grounds from the river?
The Hack. Someone could have cracked a power company control system and “adjusted” a few things. I once authored software systems for control of large building complexes. Most such systems have queues of time based actions. If an attacker penetrated several systems, they could insert minor events synchronized to milliseconds. Even the actual queue insertions could be handled by stealthy, pre-positioned “Trojan Horse” programs. An innocuous looking message could trigger the countdown sequence. The trigger could be sent from anywhere on the planet. Perhaps the Microsoft worm was a diversion.
Each event on it’s own would be insignificant, but the sum of all could be a big problem.
A trail might be left, but it would be difficult to uncover if there was a dispersed attack. If only one site were involved it would be much easier to find evidence both because the source of the First Cause would be pin-pointed and because the event itself would be out of the ordinary.
If the attackers were moderately good they would leave a trail only discoverable by computer forensics. The critical computer log entries would be gone unless printed on paper as they occured… or if they were intended to be found.
These scenarios are an intellectual exercise. Taking down a power grid is an annoyance but doesn’t accomplish anything in and of itself. There has been no “other” event connected to it. No claims of holding American infrastructure under threat. No major attack during the early blackout confusion. No operational movements and pre-setting of people or material… hmmm.
Just thought I’d keep y’all worryin’ over there!
Virginia Postrel’s latest NY Times column highlights what may become a growing weakness in the regulatory state.
Oscar Wilde defined a cynic as someone who “knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.” To many people, that sounds like an economist or an executive.
But Wilde’s witticism ignores what prices do. They convey information about how people value different goods, including the intangibles an aesthete like Wilde would care about most.
. . .
Public policy often regards aesthetic value as illegitimate or nonexistent. This oversight comes less from ideological conviction than from technocratic practice. Unlike prices, regulatory policy requires articulated justifications and objective standards. So policy makers emphasize measurable factors and ignore subjective pleasures.
As the info-industrial economy advances, the regulatory state will look increasingly out of step and, one hopes, irrelevant and undesirable. Regulation is all about conformity, and while top down conformity might appear to be tolerable in a society that is struggling to make ends meet, one hopes that it will become increasingly intolerable as it becomes more of a barrier to the kinds of pleasure-seeking and self-realization that people are willing to go to great lengths to achieve when they have the means to do so. As Ms. Postrel points out, the pricing mechanism of the market lets people pursue these essentially aesthetic ends as far as they want (or can afford), while top-down policy-driven efficiencies all too often preclude these pursuits.
Future debates over the regulatory state may play out as a struggle between the competing values of risk-aversion and efficiency on the one hand, and self-individuation and aesthetics on the other.
A cascade of power blackouts have hit the north eastern USA and parts of Canada, causing widespread chaos. It was also reported that due to the power cuts, the United Nations building in New York City has been closed.
So, not entirely bad news then.
The Financial Times in an editorial chastises the U.S. Federal Reserve bank chairman Alan Greenspan for encouraging speculators, such as those mysterious bodies called hedge funds, to snaffle up bonds recently by cutting interest rates to ward off deflation, only to find that bond prices dropped sharply once it appeared the economic situation in the U.S. was improving. (It is too early to say for sure that things are getting better in the world economy though. Certainly not in Continental Europe).
I do not really have a quick way of picking through the rights and wrongs of the FT’s position. I think it is plainly daft that Greenspan, who remains one of the sharpest economic brains around, would have deliberately set out to con investors. What I do think this episode does, however, is reinforce in my mind the enormous risks of entrusting great economic powers to folk like Dr. Greenspan. In fact, the more highly regarded such men and women are, the more lethal the consequences when they slip up.
Even many folk who consider themselves to be ardent free marketeers can get caught up in near religious reverence for the great central banker. Financial speculators hang on every word. The most bland of statements are parsed for some deeper meaning. I have spent too many hours than I care to remember trying to work out if the statement of X or Y actually suggests that inflation is likely to up, down, or whatever.
The cult of the central banker is one of those belief systems of surprisingly short duration, by historical standards. Maybe in decades to come, we will look back on the era of Alan Greenspan and his ilk rather as we would that of the Medieval Popes. And we will be even more struck when we recall that Greenspan, when a young economics student and friend of Ayn Rand, urged a return to old-style private banking and the unfairly maligned Gold Standard.
It turns out that the US government’s asinine “equal time” rule for broadcasters, which requires them to give all candidates for office equal time on their stations, will be applied to effectively bar the broadcasting of Arnold Schwarzenegger movies in California for the duration of the recall campaign.
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s foray into California’s gubernatorial recall election poses a dilemma for broadcasters who might be tempted to show his films during the race: Doing so would allow rival candidates to demand equal time.
For that reason, broadcasters in California will likely not air Schwarzenegger movies such as “Total Recall” and the “Terminator” or a repeat of a “Diff’rent Strokes” episode with Gary Coleman for the next few months.
Cable channels are not covered by the Federal Communications Commission’s equal-time provision, which in the past kept reruns of “Death Valley Days” off the air while Ronald Reagan ran for president.
Since there are 240 candidates, no broadcaster would possibly risk having to cough up 2 hours for each candidate as “equal time” for Arnold’s movie appearances.
Sticking with the ‘names’ theme, it must be silly season in the US Congress. At least, I certainly hope so because this is the quite the daftest thing I have heard in a good long while:
Do devastating hurricanes need help from affirmative action?
A member of Congress apparently thinks so, and is demanding the storms be given names that sound “black.”
The congressional newspaper the Hill reported this week that Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, feels that the current names are too “lily white,” and is seeking to have better representation for names reflecting African-Americans and other ethnic groups.
First there was ‘Scoop’ Jackson, now we have ‘Windbag’ Lee.
“All racial groups should be represented,” Lee said, according to the Hill. She hoped federal weather officials “would try to be inclusive of African-American names.”
What about tornadoes? Don’t they deserve names as well? This is pure weatherism.
All the coverage of California we have had in Britain has not mentioned the fact that another large State in the United States has just balanced its budget.
I believe I am right in saying that the second largest State in the Union (Texas) has balanced its budget without increasing taxes.
Texas has achieved this by the strange practice of – cutting government spending
This policy does not often occur to politicians or media folk.
US Senate will be voting on a proposed law that would prevent the taxation of Internet access. The Internet Tax Non-Discrimination Act was approved by the Senate Commerce Committee whose approval sends the measure to the full Senate for a vote. Computerworld reports:
The bill, introduced by Sen. George Allen (R-Va.), would make permanent a five-year-old moratorium on Internet-specific taxes. Congress first approved a three-year moratorium in 1998 and renewed it again in 2001, but it’s now set to expire on November 1st.
The moratorium prohibits taxes on Internet access, discriminatory taxes on purchases made over the Internet and the double-taxation of Internet commerce (by two different states, for instance). It doesn’t, however, outlaw the collection of sales taxes on items bought in Internet transactions.
All technologies used to provide Internet access, which now include wireless, Digital Subscriber Line, cable modem and dial-up connections would be exempt.
Sounds like good news to me. And if TCPA/TCG and Palladium/NGSCB were stopped somehow, now that would be great news!
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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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