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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American readers will no doubt be familiar with the long standing trade of the bail bond companies. Non-American readers may not be so familiar with the system, in which private companies post bail for defendants in return for a fee. It is a process which is not allowed in most other countries, but it seems that it is a highly effective system in ensuring that defendants appear for their trials.
I myself had no idea about the bail bond industry until I read this article about it in the New York Times. The American Bar Association hates the practice, it seems, and given the grip of lawyers in other legal systems, it is very unlikely that the practice will be emulated elsewhere. Which is a pity; some of these American innovations have a lot going for them.
It had to happen and it has. Both statist parties have found a way around the anti-First Amendment law (MCCAIN-Feingold) of the contemptible John McCain. This is the law whose intent is to prevent protected political free speech from occurring during the late period of the US election.
I read somewhere recently (and cannot find it right now) about a liberal group who are raising money to attack George Bush through the entire campaign season. This seems silly until you realize that he is a proxy for the Republican Party.
The Republican’s have their own breed of professional slime tossers and they have settled on Bill Clinton as a good proxy for Hillary and the Democrats in general.
The bottom line? John McCain is not only a totalitarian: he’s a moron as well.
In 2004 in this space, Gabriel Syme noted some disturbing revelations from an FBI translater, Sibel Edmonds. It turns out that Edmonds had, in fact, plenty more to say, but had kept her own counsel. Until now.
A WHISTLEBLOWER has made a series of extraordinary claims about how corrupt government officials allowed Pakistan and other states to steal nuclear weapons secrets.
Sibel Edmonds, a 37-year-old former Turkish language translator for the FBI, listened into hundreds of sensitive intercepted conversations while based at the agency’s Washington field office.
She approached The Sunday Times last month after reading about an Al-Qaeda terrorist who had revealed his role in training some of the 9/11 hijackers while he was in Turkey.
Edmonds described how foreign intelligence agents had enlisted the support of US officials to acquire a network of moles in sensitive military and nuclear institutions.
Among the hours of covert tape recordings, she says she heard evidence that one well-known senior official in the US State Department was being paid by Turkish agents in Washington who were selling the information on to black market buyers, including Pakistan.
The allegations, to say the least, are explosive. The FBI has denied everything, as you might expect. But a disturbing picture is emerging, and given the fairly dodgy reputation of American government officials to start with, it is not hard to believe that Edmonds, if anything, understates the scale of the dirty dealings going on between the United States and various regimes.
I have been reading the Ron Paul Campaign blog on a regular basis and this portion of an interview with Glenn Beck brought a grin to my face:
GLENN: Okay. If you were President of the United States, what would you do?
PAUL: Well, the advice would be return to the market economy. First
we would have to deregulate. We had a crisis a few years ago, at least
a supposed crisis with Enron and they superregulated. So I would
repeal certainly major portions of the Sarbanes-Oxley. So we would
argue for deregulation. Then, of course, there should be major, major
tax reform…
I suspect Editor Perry will also gain a smile from this one. Sarbanes-Oxley has been a disaster to the US economy from the git-go and it is about time a politician got up and admitted it.
Of course the City of London has loved it… all those US IPO’s did not vanish, they just came over here to Merry Olde Englande.
Today (still Tuesday in Wisconsin), Fred Thompson announced that he has withdrawn his candidacy for president. This is a huge loss to believers in limited government as Fred was the last person standing who represented us and could win in the national election. I believe he was the only hope for a soft landing when the bloated government and all of its myriad schemes inevitably collapse. All of the other candidates are singing some variation of FDR’s song of government interventions and incentives.
There was a popular meme that Fred didn’t want it badly enough. The emphasis should be on ‘badly’. No, he didn’t sit up, offer his paw and roll over on command. He didn’t heel and he didn’t beg. It is true. He didn’t want to be president badly enough to, well … behave badly. Good for him. No honest and sane person would actually want that job. He offered himself as a candidate but could not bring himself to lie about wanting badly to be president. He did not plot and start his campaign years in advance. Our loss.
I hope Fred keeps himself available as an option if this primary season runs all the way to the convention. He is the only candidate that is not seriously flawed to some major subset of traditional Republicans. The only constituency that found him irretrievably flawed was the ‘our guy at any cost including our principles’ constituency and we would be best to abandon them. They already have one party.
Today’s economic carnival ride is just one more warning of the crumbling foundation supporting the superstate. The question is not if the superstate will collapse, but how it will and what extremes it will reach in its attempt to survive. Who will we have leading us through that painful time? We in the state of Wisconsin have just been informed today that because of faltering tax revenues, there will be a budget shortfall. Programs will need to be cut. Imagine what it will be like when the real economic ‘corrections’ hit. Imagine this happening at the national level and to the national programs. And imagine what the proponents of solution by government will be proposing.
Fred, please don’t rest easy until after the convention. This is the first convention in a very long time when the decision might actually be made at the convention. Don’t rule out options. Keep your name on the ballot wherever you can. Please don’t endorse anybody. No true friend would expect you to place their friendship ahead of your personal principles. Especially not if they are also a person who understands principles. I agree that the vice presidency is a bad idea. But please keep yourself available until another candidate is confirmed as the Republicans’ presidential candidate. At that point, you can do no more.
Thank you Fred for running and giving a lot of us even a brief moment of optimism. If you are still on my state’s ballot for our primary, I will cast my vote for you. I don’t want to miss my best chance since Reagan to vote for instead of against someone running for president.
The US Libertarian Party’s candidate for Kansas State House district 104 is a little bit different. Ferguson has also filed to run for President as well.
Glenn Reynolds famously declared in 2004:
Personally, I’d be delighted to live in a country where happily married gay couples had closets full of assault weapons.
This isn’t quite the same thing, but it is certainly keeping with the spirit. Good luck to Benny Lee!
(via Catallaxy Files)
How’s this for a title and opening for an article:
Gender or race: White male voters face tough choices in S.C.
For these men, a unique, and most unexpected dilemma, presents itself: Should they vote their race, or should they vote their gender?
The howls of outrage that framing an article in such terms would cause is easy (and rather fun) to imagine. If ever there were two things that should not have have an impact on whom a person votes for, it should be the genetic characteristics of skin colour and gender. Dare I suggest that ideology and honesty might trump those two non-factors every time?
And yet this article will most likely pass without the slightest murmur from a great many people.
Gender or race: Black women voters face tough choices in S.C.
But if it is reasonable for black women in South Carolina to vote on the basis that someone is black or female, presumably they cannot object if other people decide to vote for candidates on the basis they are white or male. After all, it does appear that framing the choice on whom to support on the basis of racism or sexism is perfectly acceptable to the mainstream media. And there I was mistakenly thinking that those things were the cardinal politically incorrect sins of our day! Who knew?
The news from Nevada (via the LA Times) is so stunning that, well, I am stunned!
Ron Paul ran second behind Mitt Romney. What can I say? I am a life long Libertarian. I am not used to getting this close to the winners circle!
I am, however, prepared to adjust my expectations, should that become necessary.
At some point we Californians should ask ourselves, how we inherited a state with near perfect weather, the world’s richest agriculture, plentiful timber, minerals, and oil, two great ports at Los Angeles and Oakland, a natural tourist industry from Carmel to Yosemite, industries such as Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and aerospace—and serially managed to turn all of that into the nation’s largest penal system, periodic near bankruptcy, and sky-high taxes.
– Victor Hanson Davis, as pointed out by Instapundit.
This point though could be made about any community. There is no country on earth that is not voluntarily in poverty. If you choose to have an anti-wealth creating atmosphere, then you will be poor. If you choose a wealth-creating meta-context in your society, then you will have wealth.
The rise of the wealthy East Asian nations, with almost none of the natural resources that bless the State of California, demonstrate that there really is no excuse.
First he has no chance whatever of being elected President of the United States of America.
He is a rich kid, yes so is George Bush as well – but George Bush gives a good imitation of looking and sounding like an ordinary Texan, Mitt Romney looks and sounds like what he is.
Americans will accept a Democrat who was born rich – they have more of a problem with a Republican who was born rich.
– Paul Marks, taking no prisoners
When I read things like this:
Police in San Mateo County, California apparently first spent months investigating the small-stakes poker game. From this firsthand account, it looks like a couple of the officers were playing regularly for several weeks before sending in the SWAT team, guns drawn, last week.
It just amazes me that so many people in the USA are complacent about the state of their civil liberties. Quite a few people in Blighty seem to have belatedly grasped what deep shit we are in on this side of the Atlantic, and when we run some article lamenting the latest outrage by the British state here on Samizdata, invariably we get some comments from The Cousins across the Water telling us how screwed we are. Indeed, but back at yah, guys.
They send in para-military assault police to arrest people for playing poker? Jeez. There is much to be said for the Second Amendment but clearly the whole ‘keep and bear arms’ thing does not go nearly far enough if that sort of behaviour by the state is regarded as ‘normal’. How about ringing your house with a goddamn minefield? I guess they do not have any real crimes in the People’s Republic of California for the police to worry about.
There is a new book about Tom Cruise, the American movie actor. Normally this information would not elicit even a groan from me. I simply have no interest in Cruise, movies, Hollywood and the pampered, pathetic world of the modern celebrity. But this new book, on the other hand, seems to be much more interesting then its subject matter.
According to the Sydney Morning Herald, Australian bookstores have been denied access to sell the book, not because of any government ban, but because the US distributor has decided that it will not sell the book outside the US or Canada. The distributor, Ingram International, will fulfill existing orders, but will not accept any more orders.
This is a very curious story. What is not said but is left implied is that the most controversial aspect of the Tom Cruise story is his adherence to the Church of Scientology. It seems that the Church came to some sort of legal arrangement with the distributor.
US-based Ingram International, described on its website as “the world’s largest wholesale distributor of book product”, sent an email to its Australian customers this morning citing unspecified legal reasons for not being able to distribute the book outside the US and Canada.
“Although I recently e-mailed stating Ingram’s ability to offer the book to international customers, the position has now changed that we will not sell it outside of the US and Canada,” Asia, Australia and New Zealand sales representative Jonathan Tuseth wrote in the email.
If so, it seems to be hardly worthwhile- anyone who wants to read the book, anywhere in the world, can do so by ordering through Amazon.com.
However it is another sad retreat from the old position of ‘publish and be damned’. The publishers of Salmond Rushdie’s book showed some courage in the face of Muslim rage in 1989, but now publishers seem to be willing to retreat at the first hint of a lawsuit.
This is just the sort of case that an aspiring young political figure with a passion for freedom should take up as a rallying cry for liberty, freedom and rationality. Do not hold your breath.
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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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