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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I wonder whether anybody was naive enough to believe that the animal ‘rights’ thugs would be appeased by the abolition of fox-hunting?
A gang of masked hunt saboteurs wielding baseball bats smashed up rods, damaged cars and started fights in an unprovoked attack on a group of anglers.
The anti-bloodsports campaigners are believed to have targeted the fly-fishermen after failing to find many grouse-shooting parties to disrupt in the North West of England.
The gang emerged from woodland near Bank House Fly Fishery at Caton, near Lancaster. About 30 men carrying baseball bats and blocks of wood descended on the lake shouting “Sabs” before smashing the anglers’ rods, damaging nearby cars and starting fights. Two fishermen were assaulted and a woman was punched in the face.
The timing is about right to ensure a Labour Party manifesto promise to outlaw angling by, say, 2013.
The way I heard the adage long ago, was “you are not a member of the club until you have blown one up”, as a NASA KSFC engineer is reported to have said when he called up Gary Hudson after Gary’s first big bang on Matagordo Island in Texas. Whatever the quote, Masten Aerospace became a full member a couple of days ago when their engine test resulted in an uncontrolled engine self-disassembly.
I am curious if they will still be entering a vehicle in the NASA Challenge at Las Cruces in two months.
I know at least several of the guys at MA. But then, I know a lot of the guys (and gals) at most of the rocket companies. Commercial space is a small world.
The reliably entertaining, if not reliably sane, Ann Coulter pens a column this week with a pretty high libertarian quotient:
Last week marked the first official admission that everything government airport screeners have been doing until now is completely pointless — unless you’re an airport security guard with a thing for women’s undergarments, in which case it’s been highly effective.
As we now know, all the ingredients necessary to blow up an airplane can be carried in small liquid containers. Airport security has not even been looking for small liquid containers. Judging from my personal experience, they seem to have been focusing on finding explosive devices inside women’s brassieres.
After five years of submissively complying with bag checks, shoe checks and underwire bra checks, Americans have now been informed that the hell we’ve been going through at the airports (but which the president and members of Congress do not go through because they refuse to fly commercial air) has been a useless Kabuki theater.
Hard to argue with any of that. Her views on ethnic profiling (you get one guess whether she is pro or con) are likely to be more controversial.
You may have thought that the recent search orgy at British airports was triggered by a genuine fear that passengers might bring something explosive on board. Apparently not, because the same regulations apply to air crew too. It is of no consequence to the official mind that a pilot can destroy an airliner without any technical assistance. (9/11 didn’t change quite everything – even where it might be thought to be relevant by us untrained civilians.)
Here is an extract from the security briefing from the BALPA (pilots’ association) website:
The requirements for airline crew are:
Any crew, whether operational or positioning, using passenger search areas must be subjected to the same security measures as passengers.
Crew accessing the Restricted Zone through staff search areas must carry only the items they require to perform their duties (including personal hand baggage meeting that description). All such items must be x-rayed where possible and hand searched where not. All crew must be hand searched.
However, no liquids of any type are permitted other than those mentioned above as able to be taken into the Restricted Zone by passengers.
At airports where there is no specific staff search facility, airports should make special arrangements for crew to be screened away from passengers.
How thoughtful they insist crew are not searched in front of passengers. One would not want them humiliated any more than is strictly necessary. Creating artificial privileges is in any case good psychology to keep the recipients of privilege loyal to the heirarchy. It also helps to avoid anyone getting the idea that the whole rigmarole is ludicrous.
Michael Totten has another interesting and well illustrated dispatch from Northern Israel, describing the situation in Kiryat Shmona, which took the brunt of Hezbollah’s Katyusha rocket attacks.
Bigelow Aerospace made a rather interesting announcement on August 11:
Due to a number of factors related to the outstanding performance of Genesis I, the hoped-for adequate performance of Genesis II and various additional factors—including, but not limited to, domestic and international issues forecast over the next four to five years bearing upon America’s transportation and launch deficits—we have made several bold decisions. An important announcement early in 2007 subsequent to the launch of Genesis II shall expose some of our plans.
Due to this change in direction, the Genesis II will be the only opportunity to fly photos and items for the “Fly Your Stuff” program. The general public is being urged to act quickly or they will lose their chance to be a part of this exciting program. Items and photos will be accepted only prior to November 1, 2006, or until all reservations are sold out on Genesis II, whichever comes first. Please be aware that there will be no second chances to fly personal items or photos in space through the “Fly Your Stuff” program.
If I were a betting man, I would guess the reason for no further fly-your-stuff opportunities is that Bigelow is going to jump to the full scale station next year, assuming the next larger size test article, Genesis II, is also successful.
I think the 2012 time line for a manned private space station has just been pulled in by a couple years.
 Photo: Bigelow Aerospace
Can it be true that UK mobile phone company Orange has suspended an employee, Inigo Wilson, for a non-work related entry on a blog? What seems to have caused offence is him making jokes in his ‘Lefty Lexicon’ such as:
Islamophobic – anyone who objects to having their transport blown up on the way to work
Unless there are other factors at play here (I will be see what I can find out), I am about to become an ex-Orange customer and will start urging others to do likewise. If Orange is concerned about one of their employees ‘upsetting customers’, well I think they need to be told that pursuing this course of action against Inigo Wilson, they are doing precisely that. I do not dispute their right to hire and fire whomsoever they wish, but I intent to try and make them suffer some economic consequences as a result if this is as egregious as it appears.
Update: I received an e-mail from Stuart Jackson at Orange telling me:
To clarify, the suspension of an employee is not intended to imply that the employee in question has done wrong. It is a neutral act that allows us to conduct a full investigation and reach a conclusion based on facts. I will gladly update you regarding the outcome of the investigation.
But as the ‘facts’ are not in dispute, that does not really answer my question, which was:
I am enquiring about why Orange has suspended its employee Inigo Wilson. It is indeed the company’s position that remarks made on an employee’s own time and wholly unrelated to his work, is grounds for action by the company? I ask this as if there are other factors at play here, I may then refrain from cancelling my Orange account.
The ‘facts’ are not the issue. The issue is why Orange feels it has to do anything about them. Frankly even requiring Mr. Wilson to ‘apologise and not do it again’ would be wholly unacceptable given that his off-the-clock non work related remarks should be none of Orange’s business and if they think otherwise, they can do without my business.
American judge Alex Kozinski, interviewed recently in U.S. magazine Reason, is roughly billed as a ‘libertarian’ judge. He is asked, among various things, for his views on the infamous Kelo eminent domain decision, which relates to the case in which a local municipality in the States won the power to evict people from their own homes in order to redevelop a site for commercial and tax-raising reasons. It is a decision which has scandalised classical liberals and defenders of property rights. Yet Kozinski thinks the decision is fine, and comes up with the following jaw-dropper:
What’s the difference between taking property for public roads or anything else? Do only public automobiles travel on public roads? I don’t understand why it’s a problem. If the government thinks the city will benefit by having a road there instead of having your house so that people can drive their private cars on it, then it has to make that decision. Who owns the road really doesn’t matter. What matters is that it makes it easier for other people to get from point A to point B using their private vehicles for private purposes. You could say “but it’s my house and my private purpose is more important than your private purpose.” But we live in a society.
“We live in society”. And so what? This judge is using ‘society’ as a sort of mystical incantation to shut down debate. His argument seems in broad terms to be a sort of utilitarian one: if the interests of a supposed majority are served by seizing the property of some people, then this is okay so long as ‘fair’ compensation is paid. His argument seems not to accept that though certain outcomes may be desirable, that it is necessary for the state to be constrained by certain long-term rules and institutions, most emphatically, by the existence of property rights. The judge’s position seems to be “property rights be damned”. If we imagine there are alternate uses of property that might put a gleam in the eye of a politician with property developers in his back pocket, then there is no limit to the assaults on property rights that could be permitted under the Kozinski formulation.
Eminent domain – what we Brits call compulsory purchase – can be justified, if at all, for creating certain facilities like a road, military base or law court that are essential for the peaceful ordering of a society, essential for human life and in the interests of all, and not just because it makes life a bit nicer for some or most of us, whether we be motorists or whatever. What is terrible about the Kelo decision is that it was driven by commercial gain, not a clear public interest such as defence of the realm.
After all, if the economic pie really is swelled by people selling their homes for new development, then that would happen in a market, albeit perhaps not in the neat and tidy way favoured by power-grabbing government official. Yet this ‘libertarian’ judge cannot see that. May we be preserved from ‘libertarian’ judges like this.
For an excellent book about this subject, see this work by Timothy Sandefur.
As an aside, I should point out that the reason I keep focusing on this issue is because American legal rulings and arguments have a habit of travelling across the Big Pond.
I appears that the Blair government has created over three thousand new criminal offences during its nine bleak years in office, almost one for every day they have been our political masters.
Polish Potatoes (Notification) (England) Order 2004
No person shall, in the course of business, import into England potatoes which he knows to be or has reasonable cause to suspect to be Polish potatoes.
No doubt everyone will sleep a little safer knowing that England is protected from Polish potatoes.
So on the (very rash) assumption that David Cameron’s Tory Party actually noticed any of this happening in Parliament over the last nine years, are we going to see ‘Dave’ campaigning on the basis that a Tory victory will mean a massive roll-back of the intrusive powers of the state?
Okay, you can stop laughing now.
The British National Party is selling wine on its website. Wine? Sounds more the kind of thing a French neo-nazi would drink. That’s lost my vote, I’m afraid. An English fascist should be drinking hogsheads of mead, or I’ll simply refuse to take him seriously. A nazi who drinks Chardonnay is not a nazi in whom one can have complete confidence.
–Harry Hutton
Having recently become a struggling podcaster myself, I have been paying a lot more attention than I otherwise would to podcasters who sound like they have got past the struggling stage. And of all the podcasts I have heard, the one that has impressed me most in recent weeks has been this one, in which Russell Roberts interviews Bruce Bueno de Mesquita.
At Cafe Hayek, where I first learned about it, Roberts describes this podcast thus:
According to Bruce’s worldview, every leader, no matter what the system, tries to stay in office and prosper. The relentless application of this simple idea turns out to have very interesting implications for foreign aid, the relief of poverty around the world and about a thousand other things. Bruce has a big brain with a lot of interesting things to say. It’s a very long podcast (about an hour and a half) and it opens with a fairly intense discussion of the theories in Bruce’s book. From there he talks about a wide range of applications.
And at EconTalk, Roberts writes:
This lengthy and intense conversation covers a wide range of topics including the evil political genius of Lenin, the dark side of US foreign aid, the sinister machinations of King Leopold of Belgium, the natural resource curse, the British monarchy in the 11th century, term limits and the inevitable failure of the standard methods of fighting world poverty.
King Leopold II of Belgium is a particularly revealing example.
→ Continue reading: Bruce Bueno de Mesquita on the logic of political survival and the two faces of King Leopold II of Belgium
I have never been to the Edinburgh Festival, which has been, over the years, a launchpad for standup comedians and musicians such as Denis Leary. James Glassman, who went to the event this year, observes that Jew-bashing and “gags” about the Holocaust is going down a storm. Quite what that says about the organisers and the clientele, heaven only knows. Being an ardent defender of free speech, Glassman rightly points out that the way to deal with jerks like the “comedian” mentioned its contempt. I hope a fair amount of contempt is indeed delivered.
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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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