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]
|
It is Tuesday night and I am still standing. It is actually not the drinking that does you in. It is the late night navigation of the New York subway system. Last night it took me an hour and a half to get home. Partly it is that fewer trains are running; but it is also all the repairs and shifting around of trains that happens at night. I often wonder if the City is in cahoots with Yellow Cab to make getting home late at night on the subway such a miserable prospect that you would rather reach into your pocket book for $30 to travel the length of the island.
Nonetheless, I arrived at the Swift Bar with time to spare: time enough for a warm up pint or two before the music. Even without music it is a fascinating bar to drink in. The place has a Victorian look in keeping with the Jonathan Swift theme.
An impressive old style bar Photo: D.Amon, all rights reserved
The truly unique part of the bar are the murals. I photographed one small section of the main mural. It is filled with detail and humour enough to keep your eyes wandering over it until you have had too many pints to focus or until they have settled on something lovely and drinking beside you.
A ghostly presence in the mural Photo: D.Amon, all rights reserved
The session itself is usually quite large and with an audience to match. This particular night was pretty dead although the music was as good as ever. I have been in this bar on standing room nights with musicians several seats deep around the main table. It is also not unusual for touring musicians to stop by. The last time I was here I came by with singer Niamh Parsons (an old and dear friend of many years standing, so go buy her records!) after her tour gig. Athena O�Lochlainn, a well known fiddle player once with Sharon Shannon’s band also happened to drop in. It is that kind of session (Yes, I know Sharon too).
Eamon O’Leary plays piano… as well as his usual banjo, guitar and Mandolin. Photo: D.Amon, all rights reserved
Some of the commenters here are upset that so many Samizdata contributors object to the Olympic Games being staged in London, as if we are all anti-sports or just plain miserable old farts. Not so. Writers David Carr and Michael Jennings of this parish, for example, both like sports like football and cricket. As do I (I play a bit of cricket and golf, besides other sports). The root cause of our hostility is simply that barring a miracle, the Games will end up costing the taxpayer a lot of money, and as believers in capitalism and limited government, we don’t think sport is a legitimate government spending item in the way that say, defence is. In fact, if we cannot cut sports or the arts, say, from public spending, how can we honestly hope to roll back the state to the extent that we would like?
But to be more positive about all this, it is surprising that more has not been written about how the Games, and similar events typically paid for out of taxes, could not be made entirely reliant on the private sector. The Games will create a new set of facilities in East London, which hopefully can be used for decades. Great. Then let the expected future streams of revenues generated by said facilities be used as collateral for things like bonds to pay for the project.
Asset-backed securities are an increasingly common source of funding in our capital markets. Even pop star David Bowie, demonstrating the sort of business savvy common in the pop world, has issued bonds using his record sales as collateral. Why not issue “Olympic Bonds” with 20 or 30-year maturities to pay for the Games? Pension funds, which are hungry for long-dated, reliable income, would jump at them.
But of course the rub is that the backers of the Games may lack the confidence that the event will generate the kind of economic returns used in the sales pitch in the run up the vote on Wednesday, which is why there is a high chance that the taxpayer will have to fork out for the Games.
If any budding Olympic entrepreneurs out there want to prove me wrong and show how the Games can be entirely self-supporting, then comment away.
Three cheers and hip, hip, hooray for London will indeed host the 2012 Olympics.
Sing halleluiahs and hosannas for mere, prosaic words alone cannot even begin to express the happiness that courses through my heart like a swollen river. My cup runneth over and my soul doth soar like a lark ascending the azure, cloudless, sunlit summer sky.
If only another miracle would open up a hole in space-time through the next seven pointless, dreary years so that I could, this very day, cast my eyes upon the blazing, towering Olympic torch as it shines like a beacon of hope over my home town while I fervently pray from below that I may be touched by just a few humble rays of that glory. Then my life would surely be complete.
I want to jump for joy. I want to dance till dawn. I want to reach out my hands to every single one of my fellow human beings, gather them all into my arms and hug them like long-lost children. I want to capture the stars, leap over the moon and fly along the milky-way.
But before I do any of those things, I must quickly dash into the toilet and vomit my guts up. Excuse me.
London has just won the right to host the 2012 Olympics.
I am glad they caught this guy.
Sven Jaschan is charged with computer sabotage, disrupting public services and illegally altering data.
The 19-year-old is being tried as a minor behind closed doors as he was 17 when he wrote the worm.
Sasser wrought havoc in many companies when the Windows worm struck in May 2004, swamping net links and making computers unusable.
How much high explosive would you have to let off to do as much damage as this little monster unleashed? And before you say that explosives kill people and all he did was screw around with a zillion computers, my guess is that actually, one way or anther, he did kill quite a few people. That much stress and grief must have ended a few lives.
I find myself thinking along these lines. And failing that, onwards and outwards to all those planets out there, so people like this can be transported to them, like in Alien 3.
Flying swans are the logo of the UK’s presidency of the EU over the next six months. Apparently, the UK officials are proud to point out that it is the first time an EU presidency has had an animated logo. I mean, how amazing is that? Watch out Jacques!
The idea is a metaphor for leadership, teamwork and efficiency, which is particularly appropriate for the EU, given the system of rotating leadership. Migrating birds fly in a V formation. This is highly efficient, because all the birds in the formation, except for the leader, are in the slipstream of another bird. Periodically the leading bird drops back and another bird moves up to take its place.
What a load of bollocks! We are talking about a bunch of bureaucrats and appratchiks desparately (at least I can hope) trying to recover their footing which was temporarily disrupted by the recent referenda on the EU constitution. But not everyone thinks the logo is ridiculous, for example the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds likes it:
One of the concerns being tackled in the UK’s EU and G8 presidencies, was climate change, which could potentially prevent Whooper and Bewick’s swans wintering in this country.
I am having trouble keeping a straight face here. But seriously, how about streching the metaphor a bit and hope it might be the EU swan song…?
Overheard on Newsnight last night, from the anchor-lady person, presiding over a discussion of the recent travails of the US mainstream media. It was in connection with the Valerie Plame story, whatever exactly that is. I have not been following that, and I missed the beginning of the Newsnight report about it.
Anyway, here is what Ms. Paxman said about the US mainstream media, word for word:
The reputation of the reputable media has sunk to a new low.
This is what I love about the BBC. They have their biases, of course they do. But they also genuinely try to report the truth.
Their biases mostly impinge by determining which truths they go after in the first place, and who they then have commenting on them (to discuss this matter they had Daniel Ellsberg balanced by a guy from the New York Times), rather than in the form of pure lying. After all, when the BBC features some grotesque report put out by some grotesque gang of health fascists, or some such, rather than proper news, it is true that the health fascists did indeed say whatever it was they said. It was stupid and repellent, but they did say it, just as the BBC said they said it.
The BBC prejudice is that the mainstream US media are indeed the reputable media, and that all those pyjama-clad right wing nasties sitting at their nasty computers agreeing with President Bush are disreputable. Yet these same pyjama wearers are the ones who have caused the reputation of those same reputable media to sink to a new low. That was the story here. So, that is what popped out of her mouth.
This is definitely different to living in the USSR and I greatly prefer it to that, not least because it is so much more entertaining.
Surprise surprise. Today, the headline above this story, on the front page of the Guardian caused me to actually buy the thing. But I learned little I did not already know.
The profit margins for major traffickers of heroin into Britain are so high they outstrip luxury goods companies such as Louis Vuitton and Gucci, according to a study that Downing Street is refusing to publish under freedom of information legislation.
Only the first half of the strategy unit study led by the former director general of the BBC, Lord Birt, was released last Friday. The other half was withheld but has been leaked to the Guardian.
It says that the traffickers enjoy such high profits that seizure rates of 60-80% are needed to have any serious impact on the flow of drugs into Britain but nothing greater than 20% has been achieved.
The study concludes that the estimated UK annual supply of heroin and cocaine could be transported into the country in five standard-sized shipping containers but has a value which at a conservative estimate tops £4bn.
Or, as I remember a visiting American policeman saying, in some argument about drugs that I took part in about a quarter of a century ago: These guys don’t count their money, they weigh it.
The trouble is that our political class has persuaded itself that it simply cannot legalise this trade. People might kill themselves by taking too many drugs. (The perfect punishment, I would say.) The politicians already ban lots of other things because they are unsafe. (Stop. Let people take their own risks and their own chances.) “Middle England” would not stand for it. (Middle England stands for lots of other things it dislikes.) But, but, but, we just can’t. (Why not?)
Well, why not indeed? What is going on here? Maybe the root cause, if there is such a thing, of the utter refusal of the present generation of politicians to legalise drugs is that they have got it into their heads, as have an appalling proportion of their voters, that it is the job of politicians to look after the voters, in the manner of parents looking after their children. To legalise drugs would be to send out a message that the politicians simply cannot bear to send out, namely: We don’t care about you! Look after yourselves! If all you can think of to do with your lives is take drugs, you will get no money from us to pay for them. And if you wreck your lives with them, and find yourselves ill and starving, tough. The only way you will get our attention is if you commit crimes under the influence of drugs, or because you can think of no other way to make a living, in which case we catch you and punish you some more.
Meanwhile, the rest of us can help by discriminating against people who damage themselves with drugs, by denying them employment, friendship, romantic attachments, respectability. That way drug abusers, if abusers they be, will have the necessary incentive to pull themselves together.
Drugs are dangerous, although it is clear that lots of people manage to use drugs regularly while nevertheless keeping these dangers at arm’s length. As this report makes clear, the stuff is pouring in, yet our civilisation trundles on, and when it comes to civilisational collapse, alcohol surely now does far more damage than (the other) drugs. Nevertheless, there are dangers attached to these drugs, and I for one have never doubted it, which is why I have refrained from ever using them, timid soul that I am. Even cannabis – much talked up as harmless by some of the people I went to university with – actually seems to have quite severe mental health risks if you use it too much. To put it bluntly, it is now quite widely believed by scientists and doctors that it can drive you mad – which is just what my recollections of the characters of some of the people recommending cannabis to me all those years ago have long caused me to suspect.
But, however harmful – or harmless – all these drugs may be, there is no sensible future in the government treating their sale and use on a par with the kind of genuine crime where someone else is immediately hurt or attacked or has their property harmed or stolen, and is accordingly immediately ready to help the authorities with any inquiries they might be inclined to make. How is the government supposed to learn about the drug trade? Who is going to tell them about it? (Even when compiling reports about the drug trade, with no thought of arresting anyone, all they can do is “estimate” what is really going on.)
But alas, such commonsensical questions are mere pinpricks when they come up against the entrenched mental positions of virtually all our current rulers. What is needed is more than a policy upheaval. A mental upheaval is required, and those are an order of magnitude harder to contrive. Meanwhile, it does not matter to our rulers – not enough to make any difference in how they behave – how much absurdity and expense they inflict on us in order to sustain their paternal illusions, and to sustain the corresponding illusions of all those of their voters who share them.
Hundreds of thousands of tourists and New Yorkers headed for the extravaganza riverside fireworks display last night. I was not one of them. I have done it before and did not tonight feel a herring-like desire to join the tightly packed school of fellow hominids on the riverine Manhattan coast. What I did have a desire for was a quiet pint of well-pulled Guinness and some good music. I knew exactly where to find it on a Monday night: Mona’s.
Mona’s is a small pub in the Lower East Side. It is a local in every sense of the word. There is no big flashing “Monas” sign outside. There is, in fact, no sign at all. Just a window through which you can see a very dark pub that is decidedly not ferns and chrome. No wimpy idiotic ‘theme’. Just a place that has grown organically around its central purpose of beer, music and pool for a neighborhood clientele. When I first lifted a pint here some eight years ago, it was in a neighborhood which had transitioned from broken glass and junkies in the doorways to one which was merely for the adventurous, a hangout for musicians and a hodgepodge of starving artists, writers, actresses, bikers and Irish expats. Since then the neighborhood has changed. It seems like almost the whole of Avenue B has gone way upscale. The tide of new bars has not yet reached 14th Street and the clientele is still neighborhood… but you are now more likely to run into a med student outside than a junkie.
The session at Mona’s is a very informal and relaxed affair. There is usually a core of fine musicians, but anyone who loves the music can join in. Some of the better musicians take time over a long break to show newcomers a few tunes and techniques.
As you can see, it is a very homey session:
A very traditional session at Mona’s Photo: D.Amon, all rights reserved.
Traditional music attracts classy fiddle players Photo: D.Amon, all rights reserved.
Two decades ago, Sir Bob was at least demanding we give him our own fokkin’ money. This time round, all he was asking was that we join him into bullying the G8 blokes to give us their taxpayers’ fokkin’ money.
– Mark Steyn
The retirement of a Supreme Court justice is always big news in the USA. Coming on the heels of a ruling which made big business developers grasping municipalities across the United States rub their hands together with glee, it is vital that the mindset which produced one of the most monstrous anti-liberty trends in America today not be reinforced with yet another ultra-statist. To her credit, although Sandra Day O’Connor was neither a darling of the right nor consistently supporting of civil liberties, she did dissent quite strongly from the monstrous Kelo verdict.
Perhaps now that more people are seeing past the simplistic left/right divide on the issue of eminent domain abuse, the importance of insisting on a judge who does revolt at the very idea of such a predator’s charter should become the main focus not just for George W. Bush but people of any party who think that being secure in your property is one of the very lynchpins of a free society.
|
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