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It’s now two very loud something-I-read LOLs for me in three days. First there was this, and now this from ABC News, quoted in this piece by Mark Steyn:
There’s going to be a new, painful era of self-reliance no matter which politicians get to preside over it. October 30th, 2011 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
 This isn’t so much a political movement as a form of historical reenactment. That’s why the OWS protesters are so vague about what they want – because what they want is to be camping out at a mass 1968-style protest. There’s little difference between them and Civil War reenactors, except that the Civil War guys understand that it’s not real and the outcome of their mock battles won’t have any effect. The 1968 reenactors down on Wall Street have the quaint belief that what they’re doing is real. – “Trimegistus” comments here. Like I said a week ago, farce repeating itself as farce. October 20th, 2011 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
Do you think that the people occupying Wall Street are all idiots, parasitical permanent students, studying nothing of value, and demanding everything in exchange for that nothing? See also the previous posting, and its reference to “the zombie youth of the Big Sloth movement”. Maybe most of the occupiers are like that, but this guy seems to have grabbed the chance to say something much more sensible. Fractional reserve banking (evils of). Gold standard (superiority of). Bale-outs (wickedness of). Watch and enjoy. What a laugh (in addition to being profoundly good) it would be if the biggest winners from these stupid demos were Ron Paul, and the Austrian Theory of Money and Banking. October 10th, 2011 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Why did Steve Jobs do so much of his innovating in computers? Well, obviously, because that’s what got his juices going. But it’s also the case that, because it was a virtually non-existent industry until he came along, it’s about the one area of American life that hasn’t been regulated into sclerosis by the statist behemoth. So Apple and other companies were free to be as corporate as they wanted, and we’re the better off for it. The stunted, inarticulate spawn of America’s educrat monopoly want a world of fewer corporations and lots more government. If their “demands” for a $20 minimum wage and a trillion dollars of spending in “ecological restoration” and all the rest are ever met, there will be a massive expansion of state monopoly power. Would you like to get your iPhone from the DMV? That’s your “American Autumn”: an America that constrains the next Steve Jobs but bigs up Van Jones. Underneath the familiar props of radical chic that hasn’t been either radical or chic in half a century, the zombie youth of the Big Sloth movement are a paradox too ludicrous even for the malign alumni of a desultory half-decade of Complacency Studies: They’re anarchists for Big Government. Do it for the children, the Democrats like to say. They’re the children we did it for, and, if this is the best they can do, they’re done for.” On the subject of Steve Jobs, here is – to my pleasant surprise – an excellent and insightful piece by BBC correspondent Justin Webb. Good for him. October 10th, 2011 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
Every so often a big news story develops, or at any rate a story that a lot of people are saying is a big story, and I miss the bus, so to speak. At first I ignore it, in this case because it seemed a small, local American matter of no great interest to me, and then, when I keep on being told, by people whom I respect, how significant the story is, the stories I do read don’t make much sense to me, and often hardly any. Having failed to grasp the fundamentals of the matter at a time when that was what everyone who cared was talking about, I never from then on got told about them. In more recent reports, the fundamentals of the story are assumed, rather than spelt out again and again. Consequently, as far as this story is concerned, I lack any sense of the big picture, and each further burst of paintwork that someone adds to the big picture only adds to my confusion. So it has been with “Gunwalker” (aka “Fast and Furious” which I assume is the name given to the operation in question by those responsible for setting it in motion), which is a story about American government officials selling guns to bad Mexicans, and other Mexicans (Good ones? Other bad ones?) being killed with these guns. I think. Instapundit seems to have linked to stories about this story on an almost daily basis, ever since it became a story, most recently here and here. Rather than meander on at greater length about what (this being my entire point here) I do not understand, let me state my request simply. Could our ever industrious and informative commentariat take it in turns to try to explain this story to me, and why it matters, as if explaining it to someone who knows nothing about it. Because that, pretty much, is what I am. I am particularly interested in what the possible motivations of the accused government officials might have been. What nefarious, illegally money-making motives might they have had? But also: What honourable but undiscussable motives might they have had? What greater good might they have been pursuing with the apparent evil that they seem to have been presiding over? Instapundit is fond of comparing Gunwalker with Watergate, on account of nobody having been killed by Watergate, but on account of it having mortally wounded the Presidency concerned. He presents Gunwalker as a story involving, among other things, blatant mainstream media bias. But I am also reminded a little bit of that Arms For The Nicaraguan Contras thing that Reagan got accused of. That never bothered me too much, because however illegally Reagan may have acted in obtaining the arms in question, arms for the Contras sounded good to me, given the people that the Contras were said to be fighting against, and who was supporting the people that the Contras were said to be fighting against. And it never bothered Reagan too much because Reagan was not only a genius in general but also a genius in particular at appearing to be the opposite of a genius, with no clue as to what his underlings got up to and therefore who couldn’t be blamed for anything they did that was considered bad. But, although apparently a fairly typical affair of state, this Contragate (?) matter was used by the then left-dominated media to badmouth Reagan. Could this be what the right-leaning alternative media are doing now with this Gunwalker thing? Using it as a stick to beat Obama with, when actually there are quite good reasons for what has been going on? Or are there extremely good reasons to bang on about this thing? These are not statements disguised as questions, they are actual questions. I do not know. But, I now find that I would like to. October 5th, 2011 | 46 comments - (Comments are closed)
I cannot see him in David Cameron’s inner circle, somehow. For all my worries about where it is headed, the fact that someone like Mr Cain (has to be one of the best surnames in politics) can reach such levels says a lot about what the US is in terms of how people can surmount obstacles to build a successful business despite prejudice and the rest. September 30th, 2011 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
Interesting piece by Diana Hsieh about Republican candidate Gary Johnson. As far as I can tell, he’s better than Ron Paul. September 25th, 2011 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
After parting from Jim Bennett at the Roosevelt Hotel, I had to get a shot of this classic bit of Capitalism. You feel wealthy just looking at it.  There is just a classy sexuality to the old Rolls that could never come out of the greyness of socialism. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved Instead of staying underground and taking the S train, I walked back through midtown. I always enjoy just passing through Times Square. It is never the same twice. Today I was surprised at the big Xinhua News adverts on the highest and probably priciest of the computer screens which have come to dominate the place.  I sometimes wonder if I am in Times Square or crossed over into a Cyberpunk novel. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved The screens now cover the entire surfaces of some buildings in constantly shifting images.  New York or Shanghai? The world just keeps shrinking. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved I had to stop and take a photo of this advert on the wall of the 42nd Street Metro station near the stairs down to the A Train platform. I should not have been surprised by it, given that the Palestinians were asking the UN to tell them they are a State. In my opinion, based on what I hope happens out in the solar system with some Libertarian settlement someday, you do not ask the UN to be a state. You tell them. Of course the other side of this coin is that you try to make friends with your neighbors because if you shoot at them in a Libertarian world, they *will* shoot back…  Is it really peace with Israel they want or is it Israel in pieces? Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved September 25th, 2011 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
Jim Bennett was in town the last few days for a small and intense colloquium in which he had the opportunity to interact at length with Vaclav Klaus, the outspoken free-market President of Czechoslovakia. It was not until Saturday morning that we were able to get together and I arranged for Taylor Dinerman, one of our sometimes Samizdata writers, to join us for lunch. Given the nature of our conversation over burgers and Guinness I half expected to see leftish types holding their hands over their ears and running for the doors lest they hear free-market, pro-capitalist ideas. Why, one of our motley threesome was even an outspoken Republican. Oh, the Horror, the Horror! Neither Jim nor I have had an opportunity to make the pilgrimage to the World Trade Center site in some years. I have less excuse than Jim on this matter as I pass through Manhattan so often. I just have not ‘got around to it’. There is no comparison between what I last saw and now. When you walk down Church Street and arrive at Vesey street the new building is just THERE. For me the mood for the visit was set by the passenger jet which just happened to pass by in the frame as I took one of my first series of photos.  This image set my mood for a somber remembrance. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved The other buildings are equally fine and are rising quickly as well.  I just liked the framing… Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved We had some difficulty figuring out where to go for a view of the new museum but finally did find one.  First glimpse of the new museum. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved In the process we also found much better sight lines for the new complex.  When complete this is going to be a magnificent set of buildings. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved You are never far from something which reminds you of the gravitas and the sheer holiness of this place. Reverent songs will be sung on planets of far stars of the courage of the Fireman of New York.  We will never forget. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved Although I took a number of photos with Jim in them, I liked the backdrop in this even though he was somewhat dwarfed by it. I do not think Jim will mind.  Author and pioneer space entrepreneur Jim Bennett. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved September 25th, 2011 | Comments are closed
You could live decades in Manhattan and still be surprised by what its vibrant capitalism throws up at you. Last weekend I got an invite to go along to a party that was raising money for some charity cause, although I was not one of the ones there to be a high roller. Let us just say I got in via the journalists back door since one of the celebrity guests was a Fox News personality who was also a friend of my usual Manhattan drinking buddy. It should come as no surprise to long time readers that when in New York I chill with journalists, spacers and the odd Irish musician. I knew it was going to be interesting before I met up with Taylor Dinerman at the usual media waterhole, but on the some thirty block walk we were lost in discussions about typical fighter pilot behavior with the fair sex, space policy and which foot Paul Krugman is currently inserting. I was expecting something exceptional but when I finally walked over to the railing of the rooftop party I was not quite prepared for a night time view of New York like this. It is really different when you can see the city laid out in front of you in every direction and yet you are close enough to be struck by the full three dimensions. I can hardly imagine what waking up to this every day must be like, but I am glad to know there are people out there who do.  A Northerly view of the Chrysler building and surrounds. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved The party had the standard accoutrements. If you simply looked at the bar man serving drinks from a table by the core wall, or at the disk jockey in the corner, it would look like the standard parties we have all attended. The DJ laid down a modern sound track to insure all would eat, drink, be merry and network till they dropped. I was of course doing just that. I handed out Immortal Data Corporation business cards to all and sundry while keeping up my energy from the passing trays of hors d’oeuvres. I do not think I had a repeat taste all evening.  The disk jockey kept the place rocking, or whatever you call it with dance music. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved Being the spacer that I am, my actual first photograph of the night was the stunning image of a fall moon rising over the East River from a southeasterly direction. A mere photograph cannot come close to what the eye took in. Believe me, this poor small subset of photons does not come close to doing it justice.  The view of the moon was even more amazing in person. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved Later on, after several drinks and much mixing I decided to temporarily break from the crowd, and that was when I discovered the flat was even more spectacular than I had thought. This is where Tony Stark would live if he owned a flat in Manhattan. No doubt about it.  This is not one of Tony Stark’s residences. But it should be. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved Taylor and I mostly talked with media folk, although there were lots of financial types there as well, with some of which we also spoke. I knew Taylor was fluent in French and Hebrew. Tonight I found him talking at length in German to a businessman and doing the occasional phrase in Mandarin. We were also joined by James Taranto of the Wall Street journal after he returned from a quiet far corner where he did a radio show call in to express his opinion of the latest Krugman piece at the New York Times. One of the more fun people I spoke to was a woman who started her career as an NPR reporter assigned to Belfast. She was there in the seventies, well before my time, but we still had much common knowledge to share as she was a lover of Irish Traditional music and I think it fair to say that a few of my close friends in Ireland can play or sing a note or two of that genre.  I was there with journalist and occasional Samidatista contributor Taylor Dinerman. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved It was a very international crowd, although it is sometimes hard to tell in New York. Someone who you think looks foreign may come out with a strong New York accent when they say hello… or they may speak with a strong accent from some odd corner of the world. You simply cannot tell. Late in the evening Taylor and I were sipping our drinks and talking Chinese politics with a VP of Tang Dynasty TV, Mike Chen. He is very much the all American himself but is able to travel and mix in China and the three of us were off in a Samizdata like discussion of China’s economy, ethnic strife problems, what happens when the North Korean penny drops, why China is building forces, what sort of aircraft India is buying and why… I think it rather suitable that drinks in hand, we were looking down upon the United Nations Building from our high capitalist perch.  I have always looked down on the UN as an institution. But from here I really did look down on it. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved Oh, and we had a chance to talk with Rita Cosby, an old friend of Taylor’s from Fox News, before he and I and James went off for our rather late dinner at McFadden’s Bar. Despite the Corona’s, the wine, the rum and cokes, and the Johnny Walker I had already downed, or perhaps because of them, I decided after my dinner pint of Guinness that I could not let that poor pint feel lonely. So when they headed home, I headed further down Second Avenue to an old hangout of mine. The rest of the night (and pints) is another story and I was off duty as your Samizdata On The Scene reporter. Slante! September 18th, 2011 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
I have been in Manhattan for the last few weeks and will remain several more. Although very busy with work for my startup company and earning enough to cover my daily Subway sandwich, I have found time for photos and a bit of fun as well. I was in Manhattan during the 9/11 remembrance, but I only went to Times Square as getting around in the city was a bit painful at times. On the Friday before the anniversary, a full 1 train I took for an afternoon meeting went out of service for no apparent reason. The engineer told us to get off and then left us standing on a platform up in the hundreds of the Upper West. I skipped the next train as there was no one with a large enough shoe horn and vegetable oil to squeeze me on board. On Saturday, Manhattan had more roadblocks than Belfast City Centre 1989… although there was a considerably more relaxed constabulary and no automatic weapons in sight. I did not actually see the new building until this Thursday. I decided to get off the subway early and walk down 7th Avenue through Greenwich and the East Village since I was not in a rush for a fixed time meeting. I did not notice it at first… the new building was directly in front of me but it did not register for quite some time because it is not yet the sort of overawing magnitude of the old Twin Towers. Once I did realize though, I could see that although already a large building, it has a long way to go and is going to be a very large upraised middle finger to the Jihadi’s.  It has a long way to go but with an eventual height of 1776 feet it is a message to the world writ large in concrete and steel. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved It is just our simple, quaint, un-nuanced American way of saying ‘Up yours Osama”; our way of telling the Jihadi’s they have failed and that they will always fail. We will track them down no matter where they hide and no matter how long it takes. And we will kill them. Meanwhile, we will rebuild and go back to our proper business of making money. September 17th, 2011 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
Apropos that Kevin Dowd speech which Brian Micklethwait wrote about earlier, the name Paul Krugman came up when Prof. Dowd pointed to the absurdity of calls for ever more money-printing, government spending and debt as a way to solve our current economic malaise. Some readers will remember that extraordinary comment by Krugman a few days back when he suggested that policymakers should act as if they believed the Earth was under some sort of attack from space aliens. And of course he’s argued that the Great Depression was ended by WW2 (it wasn’t, or not in the way Krugman suggests). And a day or so ago, he seems determined to cause dangerously high blood pressure problems by comments such as this, apropos the commemorations of the 9/11 mass murders:
This is unhinged. Whoever Bernie Kerik is (information gratefully received, Ed), I don’t think that you can really say that the Mayor of New York was “cashing in” on the immolation of the southern part of Manhattan. If you want an account of how Guiliani and his colleagues dealt with those terrible days, here is an interview he did with Steve Forbes. As for GWB, I don’t think there was some crazy, cynical exploitation of a terrible event although some politicians, Democrat as well as Republican, used the understandably heightened fears about security to hit certain civil liberties, expand government power, and the like. Now by all means criticise the policies pursued at the time by governments in the US and overseas, and goodness knows, libertarians of various hues haven’t been shy on that score, but I detected no immediate “cashing in” on the crisis. When events of such enormity occur, any reaction from a politician, sensible or not, could with hindsight be slagged off as “cashing in”. Suppose Bush/whoever had done nothing other than mount a police operation, hold a few ceremonies of condolence and leave it at that, or go in for lots of vacuous platitudes. No doubt Prof. Krugman would now be foaming about the complacency of such a stance. Krugman is a man who, let’s not forget, was awarded a Nobel Prize in economics, and it would be nice if a certain gravitas could come with such a position. When I try to recall the way that Milton Friedman, that other Nobel Prize winning economist, wrote about world affairs to great effect for Newsweek magazine – succeeding the great Henry Hazlitt – there is simply no comparison in tone as well as content. The hatred that seems to pour out of Krugman is actually quite worrying. What is eating him? September 13th, 2011 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
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