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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Thanks to Ain’t No Bad Dude Brian Linse for pointing me to this Matt Welch piece at TechCentralStation. Like Matt, I also remember that fascinating Red/Blue November 2000 county by county election map. However as a Libertarian (colour as yet unassigned) I had a relatively neutral perspective on it, whiich is perhaps why a certain feature absolutely jumped out and screamed at me.
The election was not Republican vs Democrat. It was City Folk vs Country Folk. The only exception to his was the democractic strip up the southern Mississippi, an area inhabited by the descendents of black sharecroppers.
The Democrats should be asking themselves: “Why do Country Folk hate us?” Likewise and reversely the Republicans.
I wonder if the divide is bridgeable? City folk may have simply drifted too far into the Disney version of the land and nature to be able to communicate with those who grew up with the real thing.
Perhaps the crossing over effect Matt speaks of was simply the reaction to common danger by un-common people. Perhaps blogging will keep at least a semblance of debate going, but I think the differences run deeper than he fears.
Carla Howell reports they are well ahead of expectations at this early date in the campaign for the rollback of Massachussetts income tax. According to the July 15th Boston Herald, polls already show 37% support for the ballot initiative. There has been virtually no reporting of the measure in the Boston papers to this point, so this level of support before the proposed TV advertising campaign is nothng short of stunning.
Get your warpaint and feathers ready, me lads!
If Carla and Co are reading, may I humbly suggest the Green Dragon for a pint of Guinness? It’s where the Sons Of Liberty met (or on the site thereof) . A very good place from which to begin the Second Boston Tea Party! The management are quite nice. It was our HQ while I was in Boston with an Irish band. They let us stash our gear in their basement.
Dee Moore and Kevin Ryan in front of the Green Dragon with myself behind the camera, Aug 24, 1994 (photo D.Amon)
Quite why so many people write about Nelson Mandela in such a hagiographic manner baffles me. This is a man who is going out of his way to give aid and succor to Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, the man convicted of murdering 270 people in the air and on the ground when he blew up a Pan Am Jumbo Jet full of people over Lockerbie, Scotland.
One of the angry relatives, who lost their 19 year old daughter, asks:
If Mr Mandela is truly concerned about the conditions Megrahi is suffering, then perhaps he should visit and represent other convicts in Britain’s prisons who are serving their sentence for their crimes in worse conditions than Megrahi will ever have to experience.
Back when I was at school, I reall seeing some people wearing tee-shirts saying ‘Free Nelson Mandela’… Now whilst I abominated the apartheid regime in South Africa, it seemed to me that replacing white tyranny with the ANC was just going to be a case of changing not that country’s tyranny but merely that tyranny’s colour. I also happen to recall seeing other folks, ‘Young Conservatives’, in the 1980’s wearing a tee shirt which said ‘Hang Nelson Mandela’… hmmm…
Perhaps marketing those tee-shirts again might be a nice business opportunity!
Better late than never?
The American Liberty Foundation “Intruder” ad will air on CNN Headline News:
Wednesday July 10 - 10:06am Eastern
9:06am Central
8:06am Mountain
7:06am Pacific
Times may be modified by CNN to within 30 minutes of the scheduled time.
4th of July
Happy Birthday to you…….
Happy Birthday to you……..
Happy Birthday, dear America…..
Happy Birthday to youuuuuuuuuuu…….
In a recent e-mail newsletter Harry Browne made an interesting historical point about the US Pledge of Allegiance:
“Returning to the Pledge of Allegiance, it was composed in 1892 by Francis Bellamy (link requires registration) a socialist, specifically to help young children become good little citizens of the Fatherland.
The idea that our children should be pledging allegiance to government smacks of Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union — the very antitheses of what America was meant to be.”
I grew up reciting the Pledge every single morning of my life for thirteen years… and until this day never knew its’ history. You just assumed you were taking part in a tradition that went back to the founding of the Republic. You pictured young Abe and his school mates reverently reciting it in their one room red school house.
At the time when the Pledge was written the American social elite were having a love affair with all things Prussian. The efficiency of German State planning was all the rage before the turn of the previous century.
I somehow don’t think this is quite the message those of the conservative quadrant wish upon their children.
Rep. James A. Traficant Jr. (OH) was convicted of tax evasion in a Federal court recently. Interestingly, he is an outspoken tax critic. Does anyone remember a similar case about 15 years ago? Traficant is not the first congressional tax critic to be silenced with a prison sentence.
Attorney Linda Kennedy from Virginia believes there was significant judicial misconduct by Judge Leslie Brooks Wells. You might want to read about it. If you find yourself in agreement, you might even want to join in the complaint.
“Quis custodiet istos custodus?”
First, they kicked the Kyoto Protocol into touch. Now, they’re sticking it to the International Criminal Court.
Will America’s flagrant unilateralism and contempt for world opinion ever end?
I CERTAINLY HOPE NOT
Is the American brand of capitalism sick? Socialists and other opponents of the free market order are bound to assume so following revelations that American communications giant WorldCom hid nearly $4.0 billion of costs, a fact which now threatens the firm with bankruptcy. The story comes hard on the heels of the demise of Enron, GlobalCrossing, Tyco, and accountancy firm Arthur Anderson.The situation is a mess.
First off, what has happened in nearly all the cases mentioned above is fraud, albeit fraud on a scale to make one’s eyes water. In a capitalist system run by fallible, gullible and weak human beings, such fraud is going to happen occasionally, human nature being what it is. The law must take its course and the malefactors in these cases must be punished severely, and seen to be punished severely. Already the chill winds of the market are exerting their effect. Investors increasingly demand a premium for holding U.S. stocks and especially those in the technology sector, which has been at the centre of these recent shenanigans. The shakeout will be brutal for some, while those of us with stock portfolios are bound to suffer as well.
Such sagas tend to follow a pattern: rampant gains in a market, followed by a sharp drop; gradual revelations of corporate wrong-doing; shock among the public over the scandal, and then calls for a new set of rules or new watchdog to prevent things going wrong again. Except that they do go wrong again and the cycle is repeated. Similar scandals have happened before and will recur. The system is not fail-safe, which is why ordinary investors must never assume that just because there are rules or watchdogs, they therefore don’t need to be careful about their investments.
More generally, opponents of the market who cite present-day cases as proof of capitalism’s weakness overlook a key point. Namely, fraud is not peculiar to capitalism or indeed business as a whole. Finance ministers perpetrate precisely the kind of accounting chicanery of which a number of these U.S. firms stand accused. Think, for example, about the financial fiddling in which European governments engaged prior to the launch of the euro. If politicians were subject to the same rules on accounting honesty as businessmen, a good number of our political masters would be behind bars.
Finally, as Rand Simberg pointed out, the bulk of these offences happened during the 1990s, when a certain Bill Clinton was President, or so I recall. Makes it kind of hard for the left to taint George W. Bush with this, though that won’t stop them trying.
Although I am not an uncritical fan of Lew Rockwell‘s flavour of libertarianism, he has written an excellent article about that most inconsistent of the many conservative intellectual inconsistencies… conscription.
His article about acceptable face of state slavery is on the Lew Rockwell.com site.
It is interesting that some of the same people who claim the United States is the ‘freest country in the world’ seem to have no problem with supporting so many American ways of denying the very concept of self-ownership and replacing it with state ‘social’ ownership rather than ‘several’ property… and even extending to a person’s actual body.
It looks likely American lawmakers will soon agree airline pilots (as do all of us with a Blue Passport) have an inalienable Second Amendment Right To Bear Arms. Or in this particular case, pilots have a Right To Protect Our Sorry Arses. Support is apparently overwhelming. The public and the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA) with strong support of air service staff are solidly behind it. There’s hardly a discouraging word to be heard in the halls of the Senate… with the exception of our old friend Senator Fritz “I’m For Sale” Hollings (D Disney) who is worried he’ll lose the terrorist vote if they all get shot before the next election.
Hollings and his friends will no doubt be wheeling out all the hackneyed arguments agin it. They’ll regale us with visions of pilots with the aim of an Imperial Storm Trooper who failed his Rifle Qual. Or like a posse from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, blowing holes through passengers, windows and wings while missing the hijacker standing Jedi-like six feet away. And of course dozens of passengers strained out of the airplane through centimetre holes while the rest balloon up and die in “Outpost” airlock-like technicolour gore.
But it ain’t that way in real life.
Many pilots are ex-military pilots who are well at ease with firearms and are just as likely to drop the sucker on the first shot as not. And as to the holes in the fuselage… that brings me to a story.
I was sitting in a hotel bar in Denver (doubt anyone is surprised at the story so far) late one night a couple weeks ago. It was a fairly quiet night. The three of us around the small round table were getting served rather quickly. But this was not your ordinary group watching sports and women in a hotel bar. The scene would not have been out of place in a movie about the making of the first A-Bomb. The table top was filled with napkins covered in arcane “back of the envelope” calculations made by a physicist friend who actually did work with Dr Teller at one time.
Among the many problems solved amidst the constant stream of engineering lubricant (Sam Adams is a nice beer for a Libertarian) were: “Will normal pots and pans survive launch in a gas gun at 3000 Gravities?”… and “What is the bleed down time for a Boeing 747 with a bullet hole in it?”
The answer to that question was: a good fraction of an entire day. And that was making the assumption the cabin pressurization was static. Which it isn’t, so basically a couple bullet holes in the frame won’t even make the system blink.
What we have here folks is your basic non-problem.
Erratum: As one reader pointed out, the movie name was Outland, not Outpost!
Last month, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft acknowledged that privacy is a central concern for e-businesses and individuals alike and announced the appointment of a new Internet privacy aide within the office of the Deputy Attorney General, who will be charged with the protection of consumer rights on the Net. Other than customer service, no single issue has hampered the growth of online business more than public perception of Internet businesses compromising in the privacy of individuals. Although new privacy aide’s initial assignments will apparently be focused on the FBI’s controversial “Carnivore” e-mail surveillance system, Ashcroft’s decision apparently signals the government’s recognition of personal privacy online as an national priority.
Or does it?
On May 30 John Ashcroft also gave the FBI expanded authority for its agents to monitor Internet chat rooms, Web sites, and commercial databases in search of clues to suspected terrorist activities; and to initiate inquiries at libraries and other public places without a warrant or even the need to show that a crime was committed. The new guidelines allow the FBI to send undercover agents to any event “open to the public”—including political gatherings and places of worship—to look for signs of terrorist or criminal activity. The agency will also be able to collect information on consumers through magazine subscriptions, book purchases, charitable contributions, and travel itineraries.
The new powers clash dramatically with the obligation of public libraries to maintain the privacy of their records, an issue that caused consternation when the FBI confiscated library computer records following the terrorist attacks of September 11. And last month Mr Ashcroft said something to the effect that churches, libraries and the Internet are public places where law-abiding citizens should have no expectation of privacy.
I have voiced my objections to such powers wielded by a government agency in a previous posting. It was encouraging to see that P.J. Connolly of InfoWorld takes issue with Ashcroft’s position that people have little, if any, expectation of privacy in public places.
“I don’t know about you, but I insist on a certain amount of privacy in public places. I don’t let store clerks recite my credit card numbers over the phone if their swipe terminals malfunction. I certainly don’t let people get too close to me when I’m using an ATM. You can bet that I want to know why someone wants my Social Security number, driver’s license information, or anything that I consider my business and no one else’s. If I don’t insist on the same degree of privacy in my Internet transactions, I’m asking to get robbed.”
He also admits to being ‘a conflicted libertarian’ (small ‘l’) who doesn’t trust any governmental institution that he can’t walk to and challenges his audience:
“Spare me your e-mails claiming that the war on terrorism requires that we give up our freedoms and similar drivel…. I do want to know how many of you think what you ordered from the online grocery or pharmacy is the government’s business, absent any crime being committed. Depending on the response I get, I may need to redefine what it means to be an American.”
That’s the spirit. Together with yesterday’s postponement, and hopefully amendment, of the Regulation of Investigative Powers Act (RIPA), it is a positive blip in the battle against the steady erosion of personal freedoms by the state. 
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