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]
|
George Galloway thinks assassinating Tony Blair would be justified because of the war in Iraq… but if that is true, others might start thinking if Mr. George Galloway MP wants people to play that game, this notion should be more widely applied to all whose political views inevitably have violent consequences.
And so if politics did start to become more overtly and directly violent, with PM’s being bumped off because of their foreign policy decisions, this new paradym could well lead others who equally as intemperate as the Honourable Member for Bethnal Green and Bow to decide it was now acceptable (or ‘justified’ if you like) to start bumping off people who have demonstrated by their support for communist mass murderers like Fidel Castro as well as inciting violence against British troops by Ba’athist fascists and sundry Islamo-fascists in the past.
Just for reference, a definition of treason is:
The act of betraying; betrayal of a trust undertaken by or reposed in anyone; a breach of faith, treachery. High Treason or Treason Proper is the violation of a subject of his allegiance to his sovereign or to the state, levying war on the King’s dominions, adhering to the Queen’s enemies in her dominions, or aiding them in or out of the realm.
The JPMorgan ‘Technology06’ show for which I was webcast editor in San Francisco finally finished up Wednesday afternoon. After the loadout, or most of it, I and four of the other techs from the show caught the red eye flight back to New York. I dumped clothes into a drawer and crashed for several hours. Despite the work schedule of the last month, I only slept a few hours… the day was just too nice to miss. Call it New York City Spring. A lovely temperature, just a nice humidity, deep blue skies and a lot of smiling faces.
After a bite to eat, some catch up on my work log and a few business calls, I decided to take myself out to a movie in Times Square. Yes, I finally get around to the title line. It was the ‘The Da Vinci Code’.
The biggest question I have after watching the movie is: “What the hell is all the fuss about???” This is a decently enough done adventure/conspiracy story, typical summer fare, not intended to be great literature or win Oscars. It is just fun. Given the infantile sensitivities of our politically correct, ‘do not dare hurt anyone’s feelings lest they cry’ era, they stuck in a bit of unnecessary dialogue to make really, really sure no one would feel slighted. Perry has already spoken of what the real Opus Dei is; and in the movie they are not the bad guys either. The bad guys are a secret inner circle which just happens to have some members there. A sort of ‘Catholic Illuminati’ as it were. Yet it is a real ‘Opus Dei’ believer who in the end saves our heroes through his belief in truth and justice.
As to the premise Mary Magdalene had a child by Jesus and she was spirited off to France and secret organizations have warred in the shadows over this for some two thousand years… I ask, if people are so terribly upset about this story, then what of the various Indiana Jones movies? Or any of a hundred novels and movies I have read or seen which use biblical history as a kick-off point for a roaring good yarn?
My conclusion is the people making noise about this movie need to get themselves unwound a bit.
Now a question. Skip the Magdalene story. Prove to me through historical, documented facts of known and cross checked authenticity and provenance that Jesus Christ never knocked up any of his adoring fans. Prove to me that prophet never got himself laid. Not once. Given two thousand years and eighty to a hundred generations, virtually all of humanity could have a bit of JC’s bloodline.
Some recent court rulings show that marriage is turning into a nice little earner for certain spouses, as Tim Worstall discusses on his blog. He pinpoints a key problem in English law that it is not possible to have pre-nuptial agreements recognised as valid, although pre-nups might influence a ruling (he goes on to discuss how things are a bit different in Scotland). It seems pretty basic to me: the State has no business legislating at all on marriage. The way in which persons choose to form long-term contracts with another is for the parties concerned and no-one else, period.
If a rich entrepreneur, or musician like Paul McCartney, say, wants to shield himself or herself from being taken to the cleaners by a wife or husband, then it should be within their rights to do so. Of course, it may not be terribly ‘romantic’ to have pre-nups, but let’s face it, if rich people fear they will lose a huge chunk of their money to a cynical spouse on the make, it will raise calls for no-fault divorce to be abolished. It could prolong the divorce process at the expense of children’s happiness, foster further cynicism about the institution of marriage, and erode respect for an important part of civil society.
In the interests of the institution of marriage, then, I call on politicians to let consenting adults get on with whatever arrangements they please. It really is that simple. (Which is probably why it won’t happen anytime soon).
By the way, I will be getting married to a lovely woman in just over a week’s time in Malta. Just thought I would mention that.
Sometime Samizdatista and now Texan, Alice Bachini, has some thoughts on advertising on blogs.
I do not want big advertising on my blog, the front of my house, tattooed on my forehead, or anywhere about my territory, and I do cringe at the sight of otherwise nice-looking people and things decorated with ugly great banners selling big blue things that disturb the visual peace. And more importantly, if someone being given secret or otherwise free gifts by the coca-cola company offers me a drink, I may not fully trust their recommendation.
This does not mean I want to change any laws or tell other people what to do. It just means you know what my opinion happens to be on this, and also where it hails from.
If I want to advertise something I will do it anyway for free because that is what blogs are for: the spreading of recommended ideas, thoughts, pictures, experiences and other human beings as revealed in other blogs.
I will have to leap into the defense of advertisers here, on openness grounds. I think that if there’s a big flashy banner involved on someone’s blog, you can be sure that money traded hands. And like Dr. Johnson, I have faith in the innocence of those who are out to make money.
Mind you, I think you have to be a fairly large blog to make advertising worth your while. I had ‘google ad-sense’ on my old sport blog, and that did not make any money for me even though I was getting 400 or so readers a day. Not a lot, but it is no easy task to start a blog from scratch and get 400 readers a day.
But I will agree with Alice Bachini that the aesthetics are just awful on many blogs. Those huge ‘pajamas media™’ ads one sees around the place look dreadful. It is not for the likes of a humble mortal such as I to guess at the complex and elevated deliberations of the mighty. However, if the Editorial Pantheon ever do decide to go down the advertising road, I do hope they will not disfigure the stylish nature of this page in the process.
The FT’s The Way We Live Now column reports that David Blanchflower is to appear before the Treasury select committee, as he has been appointed to the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England. I imagine he is up for it as an economist representative of the currently modish disguise of egalitarianism as a collectively-skewed hedonics.
So does Maggi Urry, one suspects. She writes:
Blanchflower’s most frequently quoted claim to fame is his co-authorship in 2004 of a paper entitled “Money, Sex and Happiness”. […] He calculated that increasing the frequency of sex from once a month to once a week would generate as much happiness as would a $50,000 a year pay rise. Depends, I would have thought on who the sex was with – the pay rise might be preferable.
I am a little more cynical. At British tax rates, I note that is approximately $750 a time. If you cannot get really good sex for less than $750 without a series discount then your grasp of the market is quite questionable.
Articles often reveal more about their author than their subject. A case in point is a fairly bizarre article by Martin Samuel in the Times. He writes about US warships being named to commemorate the 9/11 atrocities and moreover being contructed in part using steel salvaged from the WTC (I have no idea if this is true but I will take his word for it). He then goes on to say:
The ships would commemorate the attacks, if that is the right word, which it is plainly not.
If a warship named after something does not thereby ‘commemorate’ it, then what is the right word?
Exactly what is being commemorated anyway? Not the memory of the victims, as nothing is known of how they want to be remembered, and certainly not whether they would wish a warship to be dedicated in their name.
And so by that logic, the cenotaph in Whitehall and all those Great War memorials in almost every town and village in the UK do not ‘commemorate’ the victims of Britain’s various wars either, unless a Ouija board was used to conduct a post-mortem opinion poll of Britain’s war dead to see how they might like to be remembered. Or perhaps, seeing as how we British are so much more insightful than those funny Americans, the wise old Ministry of Defence as a matter of policy asks all servicemen “In the event you buy the farm for Queen and Country in some godforsaken hole we sent you to, what sort of edifice would you like us to use to commemorate your demise?”
Who knows in which direction their anger would be channelled? It could be that some of the dead might have thought over-reliance on warships was their downfall in the first place.
Well call me presumptuous if you like but from what I know of human nature in general and Americans in particular, my money is on the hypothetical post-mortem anger of 9/11’s victims being directed at the sons of bitches who murdered them, rather than at Presidents Clinton or Bush or the US Navy. Just a guess mind you.
While not excusing wicked acts committed by terrorists, it would be foolish to view the behaviour of terrorists as motiveless. If we regard terrorism as the work of madmen and unrelated to our relationship with their world, we learn nothing from history.
I love it when ‘sophisticated’ and ‘nuanced’ Brits and Europeans lecture Americans about history, given the millions and millions of corpses littered across Europe within living memory. Attacks by people from abroad are caused by interventionist foreign policies, clever Mr. Samuel tells us, with his wise Old World perspectives, which of course explains how places like Poland, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Greece, Czechoslovakia etc. managed to sit out World War II in peace by minding their own business.
Moreover whilst nothing is guaranteed in this life, as close to certainty as you may ever come is when someone says “While not excusing wicked acts committed by terrorists…” they are about to do exactly that.
His entire article tells us nothing about America, American foreign policy, the people who committed mass murder on 9/11, the people who died on 9/11 or even how to commemorate the untimely dead. All his article tells us is that Martin Samuel neither likes nor understands Americans. It also reveals that unlike many in the Muslim world whose perpectives have changed considerably since that fateful day in 2001, it is Martin Samuel who has a very poor understanding of cause and effect.
The NHS is now being instructed to turn its back on ‘alternative’ treatments such as homeopathy. This is a very good beginning… now all we need is for it to turn its back on non-alternative treatments too and Britain can start to allow a First World healthcare system to develop.
I think if you searched 435 randomly selected American homes, and 435 Congressional offices, you just might find more evidence of crime in the latter…
Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit.
An alteration of my domestic arrangements is afoot, and that caused me to have to relocate a bookcase today, so to do this, I had to empty the case of its books. Deep in the depths, I came across a tattered dictionary.
Because I am the sort of idler that will do anything to avoid work, even to the extreme of reading a dictionary, I opened it. In faint pencil, the name ‘Jack Wickstein, Port Augusta, 1928’ was written. It had been my grandfather’s. I wonder if it was a gift. Those were different times when you would give a young man of 20 a dictionary. However because he’d spent much of his childhood interned on the family farm, he never got a complete education, and he was the sort of fellow that never stopped trying to improve himself. So maybe the dictionary was not so illogical a gift after all. In the wake of the Great War, Jack’s Father had issued a family edict that henceforth the family was to avoid looking or sounding German, and an excellent command of the English language was a good way to go about this.
The dictionary itself is rather odd. The first pages are a series of colour plates devoted to underwater sea life. Then a list of worthies who contributed to the articles in the dictionaries. The names mean nothing to me, but the Universities were, and are, the cream of New England learning. I read the Introduction. One passage sprang out at me.
Every word, every term in this Dictionary is standard; that is, classic, or, in other words, adapted for use by the best speakers and writers. None other has been admitted, consequently the work will commend itslef to not only those who want to keep abreast of the times, but to all those who wish to have a thorough working knowledge of the language in which they are constrained to express their thoughts, ideas, and requirements. This is the language spoken today by almost 200,000,000 of the human race. It is believed that it is destined to become the universal language of mankind, as it is spreading to the uttermost corners of the earth, and even supplanting other tongues in their native strongholds.
Thus wrote the editor, Joseph Devlin, in 1925. Eighty years into the future, and his optimism about the future of the English language seems, if anything, to have been restrained. However, it is also a sign of the times that it is rare, if not impossible, to see such rampant optimism about the future in print.
Oh well. Blogging about it will not get the chores done. Back to work I go…
I have seen worse. Ian McKellen stole the show. Wait for the DVD.
At least I have an excuse for this…
The question I ask in the headline may not have an affirmative answer but the world’s stock markets have a decidedly shaky look at the moment. The British bluechip index is now at the level where it was at the start of the year, erasing all its gains. Some emerging market bourses have fared even worse. What is going on?
Inflation – which some economists had claimed was ‘dead’ – is possibly back, created as a result of the vast amounts of monetary liquidity sloshing around the global economy at the moment. For a while, red-hot growth in China, India and continued robustness to the U.S. economy may have bred a dangerous amount of complacency. We have a new head of the powerful U.S. Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke. Bernanke is clearly keen to establish his own policymaking persona after the long stretch of the Alan Greenspan years. There is a sense that interest rates could be headed up further. Gold prices have been above $700 an ounce, rising rapidly to a degree that has got some old-fashioned ‘gold bugs’ like me decidedly nervous.
So should we fear a recession is on the way? Not necessarily. The enormous motor power of the U.S. economy repeatedly counters the doomsayers. But there are clear risks. China’s state-dominated banking sector is stuffed with bad loans and investment is often wildly misallocated. The price of oil is acting like a tax on growth, although in time it may weaken if new energy supplies come on stream to slake demand (assuming governments allow it).
The economic sea may be choppy for a while yet. However, to counter some of the gloom read this sharp piece at the Mises Institute.
I have been criticized a few times for using the popular term ‘Islamo-fascist’ to describe, well, Islamic fascists such as the Iraqi & Syrian Ba’athists as well as the theocratic Iranian regime. Well if this report is correct (Iranian sources are denying it), they are planning to adopt a measure which should dispel all doubt as to the appropriateness of the term.
|
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.
|
Recent Comments