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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Surfing the cable television channel briefly on Friday lunchtime, I came across a CNBC programme about oil prices, in which a couple of analysts fielded email questions from the public about why prices are so high. One guy claimed that the price of oil – currently about 70 dollars a barrel – was grossly inflated by those evil speculators and the “real” price of oil was more like 40 dollars.
Okaaay, said one of the analysts. If that is the case, maybe the emailer should quit his or her day job and take up oil speculation if the “real” price of oil was far lower. Armed with this insight, the correspondent would make a killing, said the clearly rather bemused analyst. It is rare on television to see this sort of nonsense smashed out of the park in such a fashion. Certainly not likely on the BBC.
While on the subject of nonsense about the role of speculators and prices, this is worth a read.
I am not the only one calling for a sense of proportion. The Security Minister for Northern Ireland, Sean Woodward, told Radio 4’s Broadcasting House this morning that despite these disorders most people in Northern Ireland were able to go about their normal lives without disturbance yesterday, and we should not get these things out of proportion.
While I am inclined to agree this is not Armageddon, I would suggest that the Government’s sense of proportion is a touch selective. Had riots with firearms, incendiaries, and home-made grenades broken out in Blackburn at some march by a Moslem sect, would we expect such a calming response? Not on your nelly.
We might have woken up to martial law imposed on Lancashire and Yorkshire. At the very least Charles Clarke would be appearing on all channels advocating internment, massively increased police powers and speeding-up the Home Office’s beloved ID card scheme. There would certainly be nothing else on the news.
Is it that 40 miles of water makes the difference? Is it colour or nominal religion? Or does the security establishment (despite being in a scrap with them on this occasion), still think of Unionist extremists as being somehow on ‘our’ side.
How dangerous is nuclear power? Think about Chernobyl, all those people who have died from radiation as a result of that huge disaster…. A total of 59 over 20 years, it turns out.
The world’s worst nuclear accident is significantly less dangerous to the general public of the continent of Europe than, say, Metropolitan Police drivers, never mind the continent’s public transport systems and its oil refineries. I am unaware of any casualties caused by wind farms, but it is hard to build tall things without someone managing to fall off, or some heavy bits dropping off occasionally.
Buses kill. Ban them now!
It seems many important building in Moscow may still be mined from WWII.
Indeed, the recollections of another NKVD officer only corroborate Krotov’s story. “On October 20, 1941, there was an order to place explosives beneath the most prominent objects in the capital,” Pavel Sudoplatov, once the head of the Central Staff of the Fighter Battalion of the NKVD, wrote in a memoir. According to Sudoplatov, the Bolshoi Theater and other buildings were on the list. They could be blown up only on very special orders, however, and only if occupied by Germany’s top leadership.
The German’s would have found Moscow nights to be rather more high energy affairs than expected… as they watched the last waltz at the Bolshoi.
I ran across this via one of the professional lists I read. It is a fascinating peek behind the scenes of a datacentre that kept going right through Katrina and well into the worst of the aftermath.
The many people like this were (and are) the real heroes of New Orleans.
At last! A how-to seminar for friends of freedom and limited government: the Cato Institute’s October 20-23 seminar on “How to Win Arguments, Win Allies, and Win Friends”.
A free republic rests on an informed citizenry, but more important, it rests on a citizenry willing to resort to persuasion rather than force. And for freedom to persist, freedom’s advocates must acquire the skills of advocacy.
October’s Cato University is a weekend long intellectual feast where you can make new friends, renew your commitment to freedom, and hone your skills as an exponent for liberty.
Speakers include Reason’s Nick Gillespie, the Objectivist Center’s David Kelley, Don Boudreaux of George Mason University, the Cato Institute’s David Boaz, Gene Healy, and Tom Palmer, among others.
Sessions will be held in the F. A. Hayek Auditorium of the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C., as well as at the historic home of George and Martha Washington, Mount Vernon, just across the river from Washington in Alexandria.
Gordon Brown has written an excellent article in today’s Financial Times explaining why the old European Social Model is a relic of the past. He says that a new European Social Model needs to be created, one which is centred around free trade and flexible labour markets. He says that globalization is a race to the top and Europe has to be part of that race. Mr Brown’s comments follow a speech given by Peter Mandelson earlier in the week in which Mandelson mocked the French economy. Mandelson said the French government was engaged in a futile effort to build an economic “Maginot Line”.
It is great to have figures so associated with the Labour Party saying such good stuff, especially while the British have the Presidency of European Union.
If you want to read a splendid and truly hilarious article about US politics from the Irish Times, written by Newton Emerson, then go take a peek at Slugger O’Toole, where the entire article has been reproduced with permission.
And the reason it is so damn funny is that it is entirely correct.
A hat tip to Glenn Reynolds for this link to video from Fox News about the total incompetence of the state and local governments and their interference with those who could have given real help: The American Red Cross and the Salvation Army.
There really need to be some rolling heads in Louisiana and I suggest the Mayor of New Orleans be one of the first to meet “La Madame”.
Additional thoughts: If you remove all the weasel words and boil the whole strategy down to its essence, what the government plan in New Orleans seems to be is: starve and disarm the local american populace so they will make less trouble during the forced relocation program.
The job of aid agencies is to supply aid. It is not to tell people what to do. It is not to kidnap people from their homes. It is not to violate their Second Amendment rights and steal their property. It is not to prevent people from creating spontaneous order. It is not to prevent those who attempt to evacuate themselves from doing so.
Perhaps I can get some sleep now.
How else can you interpret the authorities intention to disarm people in New Orleans? We are not talking looters here, we are talking about people with legal weapons.
The shocking story I wrote about earlier today is now being taken apart and examined to see if it holds water (perhaps an unfortunate expression under the circumstances) and as a result, it will either be reinforced as a truly damning indictment of the powers-that-be in and around New Orleans… or it will be a rather different damning indictment of a couple of politically motivated para-medic writers who, far from recording their eyewitness experiences, cobbled together a polemical message hung on a tissue of lies, misrepresentations and other people’s stories. I really do want to know which it is but I am certainly not prepared to just discount this because I happen to be on the opposite side of the political spectrum to the socialists who wrote it.
Some commenters have said they suspect the article is ‘true in essence’ rather than a literally true account of events but that is far too ‘Oliver Stone’ for me (and trust me, that is not a nice thing to say given how I feel about Oliver Stone). I do not buy the idea of ‘true in essence’: it is either based on facts that happened and were witnessed by the authors… or it was not! It matters less if the authors were wrong about certain technical details or terminology or even the motivations of the actors in question, just so long as the actually basic facts are correct. It is their witness I am interested in, not their analysis. Once the facts are established beyond a reasonable doubt, we can argue over the whys and wherefores and justifications, but the accusations in this purported eyewitness account are just too damning to be left in doubt either way.
I find this whole thing really fascinating and I cannot thank enough all the people turning their analytical talents and local knowledge on this story for commenting! The truth will out and let the chips fall where they may.
The Assassins
Bernard Lewis
Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1967
(reissued 2001, with new preface)
Who they were and who they were not: their long lineage
Perhaps it would be best to start by saying what the Assassins were not. In his preface to the 2001 edition, Lewis states clearly:
According to a view widespread in the western world since mediaval times, the anger and the weapons of the Assassins were directed primarily against the Crusaders. This simply is not true. In the long list of their victims, there were very few Crusaders… The vast majority of their victims were Muslims and their attacks were directed not against the outsider, seen as basically irrelevant, but against the dominant elites and prevailing ideas of the Muslim world of their time.
Their Muslim opponents and potential victims responded in kind:
To kill them [preached one menaced cleric] is more lawful than rainwater. It is the duty of Sultans and kings to conquer and kill them, and cleanse the surface of the earth from their pollution. It is not right to associate or form friendships with them, nor to eat meat butchered by them, nor to enter into marriage with them. To shed the blood of a heretic is more meritorious that to kill seventy Greek infidels, [i.e., the Byzantines, their centuries-old enemies].
Lewis also rejects the tales (though current in the early 13th Century, and included in Marco Polo’s Travels) of “earthly paradises” in which drugged disciples woke to experience the promised pleasures of the world to come, after they had accomplished their suicidal mission. Furthermore, Lewis even rejects the hypothesis of a direct connexion with hashish, the effects of which were known long before the sect began its activities in Syria, where the name became attached to them, he suggests, as a term of abuse.
The religious provenance of the Assassins is a long one, and impatient readers might care to skip to the section below titled 1090: The Story Really starts.
Islam’s leadership (Caliph) problem
Then who were the Assassins? Although their first assassination took place in 1092, the Muslim sect that took this up as a matter of policy had a long lineage going back almost the origins of Islam. Muhammad, Islam’s charismatic founder, had left no intructions as to the succession, which, if he had attended to the matter, might have solved the problem that plagued almost every Muslim dynasty ever after.
Legitimists versus Opportunists: Shi’a versus Sunni
The first three Successors (caliphs), Abu Bakr, Omar and Othman, were associates and early supporters of Muhammad himself. The first had deputised for the prophet during his last illness, so his position seemed a natural continuation of that status; he in turn designated Omar as his successor, while Omar, who was mortally stabbed by a Christian (he was greatly relieved it was not a Muslim) appointed six electors to decide on his. Othman’s caliphate (644-656) ended with his murder by mutineers and this was the opportunity for Ali, son-in-law of Muhammad to assert his claim by heredity. He defeated and killed two claimants but was tricked into negotiating with a third opponent and betrayed by his own advocate. Ali was murdered in 661 for a reason that seems more personal than political, and became the first Muslim martyr, to be followed by his two sons, al-Hasan, who died at the age of 45, possibly of poison (669), and al-Husayn, who was killed, together with all but one of his sons, in what was more a massacre than a battle, at Karbala (680). But the party of Ali, the Shi’atu Ali, survived as the Shi’a, and Ali left plenty of descendants. → Continue reading: A radical sect in Islam: 1090-1273
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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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