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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Not only is the state not your friend; it does not live in the same country you do. Failing to keep proper books and records in a business is likely to end in your going to jail, if you do not go broke first. So almost all businesses do manage it.
What would happen to the board of directors of a corporation with a turnover of £10 Billion and 61,000 employees, if it were discovered it did not even reconcile its bank statements during their tenure? Something like this, perhaps? In most corporate scandals the accusation is not defective or absent bookkeeping, but that it was too clever.
Here is the National Audit Office on 31st January 2005:
Sir John Bourn, head of the National Audit Office, reported to Parliament today that the Home Office had not maintained proper financial books and records for the financial year ending 31 March 2005. Sir John therefore concluded that, because the Home Office failed to deliver its accounts for audit by the statutory timetable and because of the fundamental nature of the problems encountered, he could not reach an opinion on the truth and fairness of the Home Office’s accounts.
[…]
Because of the difficulties in implementing the new accounting system, the Home Office was unable to reconcile its cash position during 2004-05, i.e. match its own records of cash payments and receipts with those shown on its bank statements. This is a key control for the prevention and detection of fraud. Following significant work by the Home Office to investigate a £3.035 million discrepancy, it had to make adjustments of £946 million to reconcile its cash position. However the Home Office found no evidence of fraud following this work.
The report points out that the poor quality of the financial statements and the delay to their production reflected a lack of skills within the accounts branch compounded by late recognition by management of the serious problems being encountered. Management procedures to ensure the quality of the financial information produced were also inadequate.
I particularly like, “the Home Office found no evidence of fraud”. Did nobody think to call in the Serious Fraud Office just so that they could say there’d been an independent check?
This is government, you see, and the rules for government are different. I confidently predict that there will be no consequences whatsoever for anyone but the taxpayer, who will stump up for yet another incompetent systems review. No minister will be censured, no official will lose his job, and no-one will go to gaol.
Which is just as well, considering how badly the prisons are run — by the Home Office.
The Home Office is an organisation that is currently preening itself before setting out up to become the Master Department, ruling them all through the largest and most complicated IT system ever, anywhere. It is currently asking suppliers what it should do and how much they think that should cost, while telling parliament it will not reveal any cost estimates (See: Lords Hansard 16 Jan 2006 : Column 428) in case it damages the bargain to be got from those same suppliers.
Though I have other reasons for thinking that the Home Office should not be permitted to seize from the Treasury the role of colossus over the rest of Whitehall, this NAO report at least ought to give any sane administration pause. I cannot see any whelk stalls or breweries taking the risk of offering their facilities for the necessary in-house training.
In order to show some solidarity with Denmark, who are facing remarkable pressure over the Jyllands-Posten ‘Satanic Cartoons’ incident, I for one will be stocking up with Danish products at every opportunity. I find it offensive that they are being threatened by Islamist thugs and pissant Muslim governments for daring to be a tolerant western nation.
So, what recipes can liberty lovers think up that use Lurpak butter, Danish bacon (lots of yummy Danish bacon), Havarti cheese, Carlsberg & Tuborg beer and smoked herring?
And as every campaign needs a ‘face’…
One of the advantages of having a comments section is providing me with new ideas to write about, even when the comment in question is so flat-out wrong that it makes me gape with amazement at the screen. In my recent post about the economic fallacies surrounding immigration, a commenter opined that Indian immigrants into the UK were leeching money out of this country by not re-investing it in new businesses but merely writing cheques to “inactive” folks back in the old homeland.
It is a lousy argument on a number of levels, and I am not even going to dwell long on the obvious dangers of inciting distrust and hostility towards economically successful immigrant groups and accusing them of not being sufficiently “patriotic” by not spending all their profits in Britain. The argument also fails because it ignores the subjectivity of economic value. If a businessman earns a million pounds in profit from a drycleaning business in Birmingham and sends the odd cheque back to his aged relatives in Bombay, then how is economic value being destroyed? In the eyes of the businessman, helping his loved ones is worth more to him than investing that money in something else, even though other people might disagree with that decision and think him to be deluded. It is none of my business to force a change in that decision.
Also, that businessman is doing something that supporters of a liberal civil society have traditionally supported: philanthropy. How can it be wrong for a man to steer a portion of his wealth to his dependants, educate them, feed and house them? Who gives any entity the right, least of all the State, the power to say yay or nay to that decision? The argument that such transfers are wrong is an echo of the old Bethamite notion that the State is entitled to seize wealth if that maximises the “greatest happiness of the greatest number”.
A final point. No doubt large sums of money are paid by immigrants and migrant workers back to the points of origin all the time. This has happened for centuries. These transfer often sustained people in great hardship.
I have come across some dubious economic arguments in my time, but the idea that immigrants paying money to their folks is some sort of parasitical waste has to be one of the weakest.
The bizarre desire of Islamists to prolong the Jyllands-Posten ‘Satanic Cartoon’ saga has now escalated the whole issue and caused French newspaper France Soir to join the fight for freedom of expression and also republish the offending cartoons.
To quote what a commenter called Max wrote in an earlier article here on Samizdata whilst arguing with an outraged Muslim commenter:
The truth is that what Jyllands-Posten did was intended to prove that secular western values in Denmark have not been eroded by alien Islamic values. It worked and they won and by not letting it drop, muslims around the world are well on the way to turning a tactical success by an obscure danish newspaper into a glorious triumph for enlightenment values.
It was an act of will by which these Danes defended their values against yours. That you cannot even see you have fallen into a trap that bites harder the more you fight against it is a measure of the irrationality of your position.
Aux armes, mes amis!
“The French government favours globalisation”
– Brian Micklethwait
I spotted this online quiz on a Tim Blair thread. Normally, such quizzes tend to be inordinately tedious, but this one raised a chuckle. It features a series of quotes taken from both Al Gore’s book Earth In The Balance and The Unabomber’s Manifesto. Get marks by correctly attributing each quote to either Unabomber or Gore. I scored precisely 50%. Heh.
As an antidote to environmental luddites, used copies of Bjorn Lomborg’s fantastic book The Skeptical Environmentalist are going for a song over at Amazon. When I bought this book a few years ago, it cost me more than fifty (Australian) dollars. If you have not yet read this fascinating expose of the Green movement, what are you waiting for? Whip that credit card out now!
The Big Pharoah has some rather rational things to say about the ‘Satanic Cartoons’.
The reaction of the Arab/Muslim public points out the fact that we still do not know what a free press is. In our countries, we are used to see total government control over the media. Even our so called independent media (Al Jazeerah, Al Arabiyah, etc) are linked to one government or another.
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I can’t end the post without saying: when will we grow up?? The Da Vinci Code did not harm Christianity, 12 cartoons won’t harm Islam either!!
Indeed.
If, like me, you were vaguely annoyed that Livingstone acquired the Olympics, then you must hope that you are either away during the hell that will be the summer of 2012 (my holidays are accumulating now!), or you must campaign for new sports to appear in the Olympiad. The more violent, the faster, the more dangerous, the better. And free drugtaking, of course. Why not allow genetic modification for athletes. “It’s at their own risk”.
One candidate is the decidedly cool Rocket Racing League. This flying Formula One has not acquired lift as yet, but races are looked for in a year’s time. The origins of this competition lie in the Ansari X Prize, with a nod to their barnstorming ancestors back in the early days of aircraft.
A debut exhibition race is planned for the X Prize Cup in September 2006. In the six months after that, the league expects to see races at an additional two air shows and two car racing events, with a championship event in New Mexico at the 2007 edition of the X Prize Cup.
The events will take a leaf from motor racing’s book.
Rocket planes called X-Racers will compete on a sky ‘track’ in the design of a Grand Prix race, with long straights and the added dimenson of vertical ascents and deep banks. The race will run perpendicular to spectators and be about two miles long, one mile wide and 1,500m in the air. The X-Racers will be staggered upon take-off and fly their own ‘tunnel’ of space, each separated by a hundred metres or so.
Pilots will be guided by differential GPS (Global Positioning System) technology to help them avoid collisions.
Necessity may be the mother but thrillseeking is the father of invention: on second thoughts, the Olympics would ruin it. But I would still welcome a ‘skytrack’ in London, and you can submit your own idea for a rocker racer name on the website…
Those of you who follow space will be aware the cornerstone of the ‘Moon, Mars and Beyond’ program which NASA has been tasked to impliment is a new vehicle. The Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) is in many ways a return to the Apollo era but does have many useful features, not the least of which is putting the travellers on top. This avoids foam strike problems and at the same time allows the use of proven-in-anger escape tower technology.
It is still a rather old design. Nonetheless it had some features which those of us in the space community apploauded. The biggest win of all was the use of Methane-LOX propulsion. When I read a late draft of the new system plan, this was the single item I found exciting. M-LOX meant someone was serious about going off Earth to stay. It meant someone had read and understood what Bob Zubrin has being saying (perhaps yelling from the prayer town would be a better description) for nearly two decades. You see, M-LOX can be manufactured while sitting on the surface of Mars. The gases of the Martian atmosphere are all you need to manufacture it using a more than century old indstrial process. If you are going to Mars and going to stay, this is the fuel you will use.
That must be why NASA is dropping it although the external excuse is:
Any costs associated with accelerating the five-segmented booster and modified J-2 development programs will be offset in part by dropping plans to develop a liquid-methane fueled engine for the CEV, Hecker said. “From a budget standpoint, it came up as a wash,” he said. “We’re not asking for more dollars.”
NASA is dropping the most important thing they are doing in order to speed up a return to the Moon which will probably be done privately by 2025 anyway.
You may disagree with NASA doing anything at all, but whatever you may desire, they are there. They are a fact of life in the space game. It is much preferable for us to see them waste taxpayer money on something that is at least marginally useful to private sector space ventures.
You can read more discussion on this issue at On-Line Ad Astra, a publication of the National Space Society.
Please excuse any errors as my glasses disapeared whilst transiting Toronto Airport last Thursday and I am writing this by squinting at the screen…
“Everyone carries a part of society on his shoulders; no one is relieved of his share of responsibility by others. And no one can find a safe way out for himself if society is sweeping towards destruction. Therefore everyone, in his own interests, must thrust himself vigorously into the intellectual battle. No one can stand aside with unconcern; the interests of everyone hang on the result. Whether he chooses or not, every man is drawn into the real historical struggle, the decisive battle into which our epoch has plunged us.”
Ludwig von Mises, Socialism, (as quoted in The Wisdom of Henry Hazlitt, page 347, also well worth reading).
That passage, while written in the 1940s, carries a certain resonance now, I think.
Today Mr Blair and his cronies will bring their banning Incitement to Religious Hatred (i.e. death to another part of what is left of free speech) idea before the House of Commons.
Normally one must be careful not to use the word “evil” in politics. One must not claim a monopoly of virtue for one’s own side in any political debate as one may always be wrong and, even if one is correct, the people on the other side may simply be honestly mistaken. They may be voting for a bad statute, but they are not themselves bad people.
However, the vile scheme that is the banning Incitement to Religious Hatred Bill has been exposed so many times (and in so many places) that no member of the House of Commons can honestly say that they did not know what they were voting for.
There is no question of (say) “the balance of argument” or “people of good will taking different sides”. The people who vote for this bill (in the hopes of their party getting some Muslim votes – and, of course, not from tolerant Muslims) are voting for something they know to be evil, and that makes these members of the House of Commons bad people, unfit to serve in the ‘Mother of Parliaments’.
I hope that a full list of the Members of the House of Commons, and their constituencies, who vote for this measure is published and widely distributed so that people will know who not to vote for in the next General Election.
I also hope that people who live in the constituencies of the MPs who vote for this bill write to them to, politely, express their horror and disgust with what they have done.
The story of the satirical pictures of the Prophet Muhammed published by Jyllands-Posten just refuses to die away. I first posted an article about this on 12 November 2005, followed by another on 9 December 2005, indirectly on 10 December 2005 and finally on 23 December 2005 [with a picture of the cartoons].
Usually, a week or so after an article has appeared on Samizdata.net and fallen off the front page, comments pretty much drop to zero 99% of the time. Yet there has been a steady trickle of comments still coming in, presumably via Google hits.
For the most part what is so interesting is what a complete non-meeting of minds these comments represent and they fall into three broad categories:
- Muslims who simply cannot conceive of tolerating people disrespecting their beliefs. Many seem to claim that disrespecting Muhammed is not ‘free speech’ at all (in which case quite what they mean by the words “free speech” is unclear)
- People who just loath Muslims and like the cartoons for no other reason than it upsets them
- People who understand that free speech means tolerating others saying things you do not agree with and which may upset you
Not being a religious person myself, I find it particularly baffling that so many comments by earnest Muslims start with flowery religious language and go on to make religious statements, as if that was going to convince what must obviously be an audience of very secular non-Muslim blog readers.
I like to think that if I went to a Muslim site and left a comment, I would at least make some attempt to phrase my remarks in language that at least tried to address the manifest axioms of the readers, even if I intended to challenge those axioms.
Yet to all intent and purposes, this might as well be a ‘dialogue’ between different species. It really does seem to be a dialogue of the deaf. The internet is awash with anti-Christian images, or ones that make profane use of Christian imagery that many would find offensive and yet do you see many vocal Christians getting so bent out of shape about it that they call for temporal ‘punishment’ for the people expressing those views? No. Most have the maturity to just say “Oh, another one of those daft atheists/agnostics” and keep moving, not accepting what they see but tolerating its expression just as most atheists generally tolerate expressions of religion they may find offensive (provided they are not being asked to pay for it) without actually accepting there is any truth to them. But what is it about the Muslim psyche that makes the contempt of others who do not share their beliefs so intolerable?
By the way, here is a better link to the ‘satanic cartoons’ so you can see what all the fuss is about.
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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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