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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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!
Philip Lynds, a New Zealander and outsider to the theoretical physics community has recently had his theory on time published. No less a quantum mechanic than Dr. John Wheeler has weighed in on his side… at least to the extent of considering Lynd’s ideas fresh and of great interest. If Lynd is correct, we’ve been following a misconception of the nature of time since philosophers first put quill to papyrus. Read about it here.
If anyone knows of a pre-print of the Lynd paper floating about the net, please inform me. I’d love to read it.
I have noticed that quite a few libertarian-minded folk, including the late, great science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein, have been interested in exploring the ramifications of extended human life spans.
After all, if you believe in the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, then I suppose it is a natural concomitant to be interested in pushing the envelopes of life as far back as possible. Why bother to settle for three-score years and ten? And of course the demise of religious belief among many in the West – though not elsewhere – has given a certain poignant edge to the avoidance of death for as long as possible.
Extending life spans has all kinds of economic, cultural and philosophical implications. If people know they have a much greater chance of living longer than their parents, it could effect career choices, child-rearing, and behaviour patterns in the broadest sense. Extending life spans may make people more cautious and risk-averse in some ways, perhaps accentuating the current vogue for pursuit of the healthy life and increasing pressure on practises like smoking and alcohol consumption. It may also encourage positive behaviours, encouraging people to think more about the long-term effects of their actions. If you know there is a good chance of your making it to 150 years old, it may tend to affect the way you behave now.
There is a long and interesting article on CNN full of details about new scientific advances. I don’t necessarily accept all its conclusions but it has plenty of food for thought on this fascinating topic.
Here’s a random thought – intellectuals with good ideas and boundless curiosity often outlive their peers. Hayek made it to 90, Milton Friedman has just enjoyed his 91st trip round the sun and Karl Popper also made it past 90. Maybe Samizdata should launch a range of health products with the slogan – liberty for a longer life!
This story in today’s New York Times is fascinating:
Alex Malo was born with several feet of his small intestine hanging outside his body. The loop of intestine had slipped out through an abnormal opening in his abdomen while he was still developing in the womb. The tight opening pinched the intestine, cutting off its blood supply and killing the tissue. The day Alex was born, doctors operated to remove the dead stretch of intestine.
Which, to cut a long story and Alex Malo’s small intestine short, caused big problems. If your intestine is too short, you can’t eat.
But Dr Kim had already been thinking about this. Here’s his idea:
Surgeons make a row of slits along the dilated stretch of intestine, alternating from one side to the other and stapling shut the edges of each side of the “V” that results. They use a small surgical stapler, which both cuts and staples. What results is a zigzag tube that is much longer and skinnier than the original distended bowel. The surgeons named the operation the STEP procedure, for serial transverse enteroplasty.
This had to be tested on animals first, and “a million forms” had to be signed saying yes, it could kill Alex but please do it anyway. They did. It worked. Read the whole thing.
There are many lessons to be learned from this story. I suggest four:
One: the New York Times still has its uses.
Two: testing on animals has its uses.
Three: people with names like “Kim” are making a huge contribution to life in America.
Four: you need the right institutional setting to do clever things.
Dr. Kim said he had not discussed the new operation with the surgeon who told him a decade ago that it would never work.
“You have to have the right environment,” he said, “where people are open to new ideas and really try to push the envelope with innovative surgery, for this kind of crazy idea to eventually make it to the bedside to treat children with disease.”
Entrepreneurship is just as much a medical thing as a more conventionally “business” thing, or, to put it another way, running medicine rather like a business, as the USA is famous for doing, can also do a lot of good.
I don’t know the details of how well or badly Britain’s National Health Service works in circumstances like these, but I doubt it would have been such a good environment for Dr Kim, or for Alex Malo.
Aristocracy [Late Latin aristocratia, government by the best, from Greek aristokrati : aristos, best; see ar- in Indo-European Roots + kratos, power; see -cracy.]. An aristocracy is a form of government in which rulership is in the hands of an “upper class” known as aristocrats. (The Greek origins of the word aristocracy imply the meaning of “rule by the best”.)
People like David Attenborough or almost anyone connected with Population Connection (a group which used to be rather more directly called ‘Zero Population Growth’), are technocrats at heart. Problems are identified, analyzed by experts and their solutions to those problems are imposed via political interaction. It is simply ‘rule by expert’ and there is quite literally no limit to the areas of life which is beyond the overarching gaze of the men and woman with letters after their names. When such people are given access to political power, no limits to what they can make you do or not do. The experts are, after all, the best and thus know best, and if people will not be swayed by their words spoken from the position of superior knowledge, then they must be forced to comply via the political system. They are the new would-be aristocracy in the literal Greek sense of the word.
In today’s Times of London (we do not link directly to The Times), David Attenborough, speaking for the Optimum Population Trust, demanded that the British state work to halve Britain’s population by establishing a ‘population policy’.
He said: “The human population can no longer be allowed to grow in the same old uncontrolled way. If we do not take charge of our population size, then nature will do it for us and it is the poor people of the world who will suffer most.”
[…]
[the Optimum Population Trust] believes that Britain should seek to reduce its population from its present 59m to about 30m by 2130 — about the same as the population in 1870. It wants economic incentives for women to stay childless, free contraception, a balanced approach to immigration and a government population reduction policy.
Indira Gandhi and Deng Xiaoping shared such views and enacted policies based on the realization that gentle prods will not stop people having children. Their views were based on crude pragmatism married with an honest understanding of the efficacy of coercive violence.
People like David Attenborough however take a rather more lyrical utopian view of nature and ‘sustainable economics’ (which in fact has nothing whatsoever to do with economics) and thus are rather more grandiose in their objectives. They seek to limit people’s right to have children or to travel the world or engage in ‘wasteful’ or ‘harmful’ economic activity generally that is not approved of by…well, them, of course. They wish to restore balance and harmony. This sort of idealized view of nature and man’s place in it (or lack thereof) was something that would have gained approving nods not just from idyllic ruralist 18th and 19th century poets but also Heinrich Himmler.
For these people there are no ‘market’ solutions caused by the social interaction of free people, because that would allow the possibility that free people may simply ignore the ‘wise words’ of The Best. In a political system, rather than a social system, there are only a few people who must be convinced and manipulated, and thus it through coercive collectivist politics that the new technocratic aristocracy seek to apply their ‘wisdom’.
At least the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement are not trying to use the violence of state to make people comply. The same cannot be said of Sir David Attenborough and his collectivist ilk.
It is a central plank of federast propoganda that the European Union is the only way to stop conflagrations like WWI and WWII from happening again. I have always regarded such pronouncements as specious self-delusion. Indeed, certain features of life in wartime Europe are beginning to re-appear, such as austerity, rationing and empty shelves:
Gardeners were banned from buying dozens of pesticides from yesterday under new European rules. The 80 gardening products, mostly lawn treatments, have been withdrawn from the shelves. They can be used until the end of December.
They include many sold by major retailers including B&Q, Asda and Do It All, and are being banned alongside 135 agricultural products.
Thus we are saved from the cataclysmic horror of law treatments. Household cleaning products are probably next.
Nor is this the end but merely the beginning for what we are seeing is the EU’s ‘precautionary principle’ in action. As a result, thousands of chemicals used everyday, domestically and commercially, now have to be subjected to an exhaustive and expensive testing procedure to ensure that they post not the even the merest smidgeon of a hint of a suggestion of a risk to health. This is despite that face that, in most cases, these chemical products have been used for years, even decades, without anyone growing three heads as a consequence.
For many, particularly smaller scale, producers the cost of compliance means bankruptcy so they simply withdraw the products from sale. Result: a gradual emptying of shelves.
And who, exactly, is behind it? As if we couldn’t guess:
Friends of the Earth welcomed the move but raised doubts as to whether the outlawed pesticides would be disposed of properly. The environmental pressure group also claimed some products were not covered by the ban despite being proven to damage human health.
Yes, the enviro-mentalists. Europe’s ‘jihadis’; they may be self-righteous creeps with faces one can never can tired of punching but they have managed to secure themselves a svengali-like grip on the minds of Europe’s Cardinals.
By this time next year, Samizata articles will be written on papyrus scrolls and distributed to our readers by mule-train.
What’s this about?
Meanwhile, mobile-phone services were mysteriously available in Baghdad yesterday, bringing cellular service – banned under Saddam Hussein – to ordinary people in the Iraqi capital for the first time.
Officially, a tender for the three mobile-phone licences the US-led administration plans to offer across Iraq has yet to take place.
A US military spokesman could not explain why the lines turned on or what that meant for the tender.
Users of foreign mobile phones were able to make and receive calls and send text messages. Currently, few Iraqis have suitable phones. Foreign workers in Baghdad, who have widely relied on expensive satellite telephones to stay in touch, were greeted with the words: “MTC-Vodafone wishes you a pleasant stay in Kuwait.”
Those are the concluding paragraphs of a Scotsman story, a story that is mostly about happy reactions in Baghdad to the Uday/Qusay killings.
David Masten of Catallarchy, to whom thanks for spotting this twist at the end of this story, thinks it’s the free society doing its thing.
In other words while occupation forces are trying to set up the new addition to their mercantilist empire, some people are just doing what is necessary to make life and society better, without any centralized direction or even permission. In a land where landwire communications infrastructure has been little more than rubble for over a decade, cell phones are a quick and easy way to build up communications networks.
If licensing and nationalized services are the US government’s idea of ‘freedom and democracy’ for Iraq, bring our boys and girls back home.
Well that could be the story. But couldn’t it merely be that one bit of the new administration (the bit that was setting up this auction) was operating in ignorance of what another bit (a bit that was just setting a system up regardless) was doing? Much as I’d love to praise this as free market anarchy in action, I have my doubts. It could surely just as easily be the other anarchy, state anarchy. Anyone who has ever worked for a state will know that anarchy never goes away.
Michael Jennings knows everything about portable phones, but he’s in Provence right now, and so may not comment as quickly as he would normally. But eventually he’ll clarify everything for us.
Meanwhile, the general point that portable phones are great news for the poorer and less stable parts of the world is reinforced once again. In that sense this is definitely yet another for the Samizdata Triumphs of Capitalism collection.
Regular phones depend on wires. And not just on any old wires – on wires that have to stay connected throughout their entire length. Portable phones rely on only a few fixed installations, which can be defended against marauders and can therefore stay in business. They are also, even in a totally law-abiding place, quicker to get started. I recall how they were able to crack ahead fast with the reconstruction of East Berlin, immediately after the Wall came down, thanks to the magic of the portable phone.
I do love a good technical fix. Just who presided over this one I for one am not clear about, but a technical fix this nevertheless is.
Bill Thompson wrote a rather histrionic article over on the BBC1 site about the recent incident in which a former US Marine went off on a, ehem, ill advised magical mystery tour with a 12 year old English girl. The bit I just loved in Thompson’s article was:
Shevaun’s disappearance was the net’s fault and we have to accept this. She would not have had any contact with her 31-year old ex-Marine if it had not been for the easy access to e-mail and chat that today’s children seem to demand as a right, and we should not pretend otherwise or blame inadequate supervision.
…that is like saying if the child had being dragged into a car and kidnapped:
Shevaun’s disappearance was the M25’s 2 fault and we have to accept this
Make our communities safe for children…ban roads and sidewalks I say! Ban them all!
So if ‘The Internet’ kidnapped this girl, then why is Toby Studabaker the one on trial for it and not this wicked fellah called The Internet?
Ok, Thompson says that this girl got into trouble (or at least everyone else feels she got into trouble, she never did seem to show much sign of thinking so herself from what I read), and she did this because she had access to a computer, which her parent have provided and thoughtfully equipped with a modem, over a phone line which they pay for, but somehow we must not blame inadequate supervision by the parents.
Goodness no! I mean, if we did that, next thing you know people might be saying it was a bad idea for parents to leave their loaded shotguns around their teenager’s room. Instead we must impose sweeping bans on who can use chatrooms! And why is that, pray tell, Bill? Ah… I understand… you write for the BBC of course! Never suggest a sensible private solution at the family level if an excuse can be found for some wonderful collective state intervention! Silly me. For one blinding and foolish moment I actually thought parents might be responsible for their children’s welfare!
1 = Link via our favourite statist technogeeks at iSociety
2 = The M25 is London’s orbital motorway (freeway)
Samizdata has been getting very political lately. I blame all these Conservatives who have wormed their way on to the Samizdata writers list.
So, to more serious matters. Here is an item to warm the cockles, drawn to my attention by this guy. He made this Portillo bon mot his quote of the day, and I think that this gem that he linked to last Friday deserves a chance to sparkle more universally than I have noticed it sparkling so far.
Masturbating more than five times a week between the ages of 20 and 50 could protect men against prostate cancer, Australian researchers claim today.
Excellent. The Anglosphere continues to pull its weight, scientifically speaking.
Inevitably, the Mother Country, in the shape of a charity worker, disapproves.
Dr Chris Niley of the UK’s Prostate Cancer Charity said: “It’s plausible – which isn’t the same as being true. One of the unanswered questions is whether the young men who were questioned may have exaggerated how many ejaculations they had had.
Speak for yourself you boring killjoy.
What we now need is another study about the correlation between being a rabid believer in expanding the power of the state, and getting prostate cancer, along the lines of this. That’s prostate as in pro-state.
This has just popped up on the Libertarian Alliance Forum courtesy of Dr Chris R. Tame, who intends to live for ever and who therefore keeps an eye open for such things:
(7-3-03) BOSTON, Mass. – A new pill, developed by CereMedix, a biotech startup at Northeastern University, could restore the body’s natural defenses so drastically that people might routinely live to be a healthy 120 years old, researchers say.
The substance, which promotes the production of natural anti-oxidants, is set to be tested in two prescription forms, one designed to repair lung damage from smoking and the other to speed recovery from heart surgery.
In prescription form, the drug could have valuable applications for a wide range of ailments, including Alzheimer’s Disease, stroke and coronary damage, diabetes and virtually any illness that results from oxidative stress. In addition to the two prescription drugs in trial, CereMedix has another version in development: an over-the-counter supplement that would slow aging and increase energy by stimulating the production of natural anti-oxidants.
Etcetera etcetera, miracle miracle.
As one of those people who has no idea what a natural anti-oxidant is, I file this under: “This sounds marvellous – hope it works one day”. Although that bit about how they are threatening to repair the damage to lungs caused by smoking will already have made them very unpopular. Their laboratory has probably already been surrounded by baying anti-capitalist hooligans. Bad. But also good, because this will drag them into politics if they haven’t been already, and will turn them into devout believers in the Samizdata meta-context, if they aren’t already.
That aside, the worst news this could be is that yet another bunch of scientists got all excited and thought they’d achieved more than they had.
And the best news it could be is yet another triumph of capitalism in the making, and a truly spectacular one.
“Biomedic startup.” Whenever you hear of Americans using the word startup, you know that they are seeing dollar signs as well as the betterment of mankind. And what’s wrong with that, I’d like to know?
The usual burst of technologically well-informed comments would be very nice, to explain to us all whether there is anything to this or if it’s just hype and hot air.
Cloning is an understandably controversial subject, and it would appear that all the excitement about cloning humans may have been somewhat premature. But this sounds like a potentially most entertaining application of the principle:
After a six-year search Japanese scientists are preparing to clone prehistoric woolly mammoths from frozen DNA samples found in Siberia.
Inspired by Dolly the sheep – cloned from the cell of an adult ewe in Scotland in 1996 – and the film Jurassic Park, researchers from Kagoshima and Kinki universities and the Gifu Science and Technology Centre began the search in 1997 for sperm or tissue from mammoths preserved in the tundra.
The plan was to find a frozen male, recover samples of its sperm, inseminate a modern elephant and create a mammoth-elephant hybrid. No sperm was ever found. Several mammoths, preserved in the permafrost, have been identified in Siberia but the DNA was degraded.
So how are they doing?
The Japanese scientists collected samples of bone marrow, muscle and skin from mammoth remains found in Siberia last August. Yesterday, after a year fighting Russian bureaucracy, the samples arrived.
The researchers face a series of new hurdles. First, they have to confirm the samples are from mammoths, then see if they can isolate a full set of chromosomes. Then they would have to fuse an egg from a living relative – an elephant – with DNA from an extinct creature. Then there would be the challenge of implanting the embryo into the womb of a host mother.
Doesn’t sound very much like “cloning” to me. And since this is the Guardian, no article about a creature that thrives in a cold climate would be complete without a gratuitous reference to global warming.
If they overcame all these challenges, they would then be faced with the biggest of all: what to do with a lonely ice age mammal in a rapidly warming world.
Oh for heavens sake. Go north. Use a fridge. Biggest challenge of all indeed.
And as to what to do with it, hasn’t the Guardian heard of show business? That’s what all this is about. This is not “pure” science, which pure science seldom is anyway. Think Jurassic Park. Think Elephant Man. Or in this case Elephant Mammoth.
Infoworld reports that the European Commission announced plans to combat spam yesterday, promising “concrete action” by October.
Research commissioned by the European Commission shows that by the end of this summer more than half of all the e-mails in the union will be spam. Erkki Liikanen, European Commissioner for Enterprise and the Information Society announced confidently:
Combatting spam has become a matter for us all, and has become one of the most significant issues facing the Internet today.
Yes, spam is annoying but let’s get things into perspective… In the typical bureaucrat fashion, you first build up a problem and then you solve it and bask in the glory of central control…
The EC promised that the concrete action would focus on effective enforcement based on international cooperation among different countries. It would also include technical measures for countering spam, and raising consumer awareness of the issue.
I wonder how this will be achieved. More monitoring, more data pooling and generally more interference with ISPs and private companies.
The Commission’s plans are designed to coincide with a new law on data protection that forbids unsolicited e-mailing. This directive is due to be transposed into the statute books of the 15 European Union member states in October.
Great. What we need is another directive forbidding this or that. And pray, do tell how will they enforce that…?
Under the data protection law, e-mail marketing will only be allowed with prior consent from the recipient. This “opt-in” approach does, however, permit marketing companies to target their existing customers.
Yes, a good idea, but why does it have to be regulated from the top? How gracious of the EC to permit marketing companies to target their existing customers. Arguably there is a widespread ‘conning’ of customers by many Web firms promising that they will not share private information and then selling or renting their customer lists anyway. But as this article indicates customers and markets are a much better way of handling this kind of issue than a bunch of bureaucrats in Brussels.
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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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