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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Laziness in blogging is defined as examining the attitude of the United Nations or any other NGO in regard to some humanitarian crisis caused by your common garden dictator. Easy and rich pickings. For this particular example, let us take Robert “Gay Gangster” Mugabe as an egregious example of dictatorial excess and the World Food Programme as your normal international bureaucracy.
In reality, “Mad Bob” has ruined his country, urinated on the poor and used food aid as a tool of oppression and death. In UNWorld, Comrade Bob is a welcome member of the international community. As James Morris, ‘United Nations Special Envoy for Humanitarian Affairs for Southern Africa’ (such a big title for an oh-so important man), stated recently:
Mr Morris said the President told him that Zimbabwe welcomed assistance that was purely humanitarian.
“We have had a very positive discussion with President Mugabe. We have had a very good working relationship for several years. The President said he welcomed food assistance that comes with humanitarian commitment,” said Mr Morris.
He said Zimbabwe and the World Food Programme (WFP), a UN agency, had a good working relationship stretching over several years.
Mr Morris knows that this is the case because Comrade Mugabe is committed to agricultural reform.
The UN envoy said it emerged during his talks with Cde Mugabe that the President was committed to the development of agriculture and ensuring food security in Zimbabwe.
“I thank the President for his commitment to agriculture,” said Mr Morris.
The website of the World Food Programme is slightly better (or worse, if you think that a chink of reality can be damned by faint praise). Their “In Brief” on Mr Morris’s visit to Zimbabwe notes many contributing factors, but the state is not given the starring role it deserves:
Food production in Zimbabwe is affected by several factors, including erratic rains, shortages of inputs such as fertilizer and inadequate tillage.
It is also affected by the spread of HIV/AIDS, which commonly afflicts people in their most productive years.
Moreover, the centralized pricing structure for maize in Zimbabwe creates a disincentive for production above subsistence levels.
However, a key reason for food shortages this year will be drought.
The commercial farming sector, which declined as a result of land reform, previously provided an important stabilising factor in maize production, particularly during years of erratic rains, as the crop was mainly produced by irrigation.
While communal farms traditionally produce the greater portion of food, they are largely dependent on rainfall.
This post is the product of laziness or the United Nations is a turkey shoot! Take your pick!
Samizdata readers may remember my article about this amazing little battle. It clearly showed what happens when irregulars ambush real soldiers.
With great pleasure I now report a follow up to the story: three members of this fine bunch, Sgt. Leigh Ann Hester, Staff Sgt. Timothy Nein and Spc. Jason Mikhave have been awarded the Silver Star.
Well done and congratulations guys!
Clive Davis has linked to an interesting, if controversial article, that argues the liberal wing of the blogosphere is now more popular, in terms of pageviews, than the conservative and libertarian community.
The left-wing blogosphere is beginning to decidedly pull away from the right wing blogosphere in terms of traffic. This is largely a result of the open embrace of community blogging on the left and the stagnant, anti-meritorious nature of the right-wing blogosphere that pushes new, emerging voices to the margins.
The article proceeds to describe and examine two different models of political blogging defined by the political orientation of the writers. New entrants into the conservative/libertarian blogosphere have to create their own blogs and rely upon a trickle-down effect, whereas community moderated blogging platforms used by the liberal left appear to reduce the obstacles that a new generation of emergent left bloggers have had to face.
Unless right-wing blogs decide to open up and allow their readers to have a greater voice, I expect that the liberal and progressive blogosphere will continue its unborken twenty-month rise in relative traffic. Conservative bloggers continue to act as though they are simply a supplement to the existing pundit class, without any need to converse with those operating outside of a small social bubble or any need to engage people within the new structure of the public sphere.
Are these valid criticisms? Has the focus upon the reformation of the existing media blinded the conservative and libertarian blogosphere to the need for further change and adaptation as the ‘world of blogs’ continues to develop? Is this part of the blogosphere stagnating?
What did you do to help the victims and survivors of the Asian Tsunami? Did you help to raise money. Did you don your jogging bottoms and wheeze your way through a sponsored run? Did you sit in bathtub full of maggots for twenty-fours hours? Did you gladly humiliate yourself by joining in with a charity sing-a-thon? Did you run around like headless chicken collecting cuddly toys, blankets and unwanted packs of paracetamol?
Or maybe you just plunged your hand generously into your own pocket, scooped out a chunk of change and handed it over with the (understandably) sincere intentions of doing just a little to help ease the plight of the unfortunate victims of that catastrophe.
If you did any of those things, well, you have certainly provided relief to some quarters:
Oxfam has had to pay £550,000 in customs duty to the Sri Lankan government for importing 25 four-wheel-drive vehicles to help victims of the tsunami, The Daily Telegraph has learned.
The sum was levied by customs in Colombo which have refused to grant tax exemptions to non-governmental organisations working to repair damage caused by the giant Boxing Day wave.
The Indian-made Mahindra vehicles, essential to negotiate damaged roads and rough tracks, remained stuck in port at Colombo for almost a month as officials completed the small mountain of paperwork required to release them. Customs charged £2,750 “demurrage” for every day they stood idle.
So there we have it, good people. Kindly Westerners care more about the sodden, bedraggled, impoverished masses of Sri Lanka than their own government which has made a priority of cutting off its own pound (or several hundred thousands of pounds) of flesh first. And this is only the stuff that is being reported. Try to imagine, if you can, the graft and pilfering that is going on underneath the radar.
As for Oxfam, I can spare no words of comfort. Their incessant mewling about ‘fair trade’ means putting even more power and looted wealth into the hands of the kind of third-world government spivs who have just royally shafted them. I doubt very much if they will learn anything useful from this object lesson. These people seldom do.
If I had suggested, in the days following the disaster, that all those munificent donations were going to be stolen then the comments section of this blog would have experienced a mini-tsunami of its own as a wave of furious readers flooded in to inform me that I had “reached new lows”. Too cynical? There is no such thing as ‘too cynical’. Allow me to put the record straight: every penny of that relief fund is eventually going to worm its way into the pockets of state officials and professional Western poverty-mongers.
The Emperor was always naked but now he’s running around flashing his genitals as well.
“Cough, cough, cough,” I spluttered down the telephone in shock when told the price. Markets are, in general, excellent at making things cost less – so effective that we are sometimes encouraged by campaigners to pay extra. So what was it that made me aghast at its high price? It was something called an ISDN mixer.
A few days ago I was in a BBC studio late at night once again. I really like doing radio, but at the same time I would prefer to be doing evening and late-night radio from home with a mug of tea. The problem is that, understandably, the BBC does not like you doing interviews down an ordinary phone line because of the poor sound quality. So while at the BBC, I got a pen and jotted down the make of the ISDN mixer being used.
What’s with this ISDN mixer I am talking about? Apparently ISDN calls are not good quality on their own: I am told you need this ISDN mixer thing which has something called a “g722 audio codec”, and it is this codec which makes the call quality broadcast standard. And do you know how much one of these ISDN mixers cost? The make the Beeb uses is £1679 + VAT, excluding microphone and headphones, but I found another make (used by an impressive range of charities and trade unions) which costs a few hundred less. Still, it seems remarkably pricey for what is essentially a box with a few buttons and a printed circuit board.
I am writing this for two reasons. One, it is possible that an enlightened reader will post a comment explaining that what I need is called an XYZ and costs $79 at Wal-Mart. The second reason is to make the point that markets are a process, not an end state. The high price is not market failure (inasmuch as I do not think there is justification for the government to start making the things), but I do think lots of Chinese companies ought to enter the ISDN mixer market. Let’s hope.
There is an excellent article in the print version of The Economist describing the situation in the Congo.
That’s the Congo. Private cellphone networks work and private airlines work because the landlines do not and the bush has eaten the roads. Public servants serve mostly to make life difficult for the public, in the hope of squeezing some cash out of them. Congo is a police state, but without the benefits. The police have unchecked powers, but provide little security. Your correspondent needed three separate permits to visit the railway station in Kinshasa, where he was stopped and questioned six times in 45 minutes. Yet he found that all the seats, windows and light fixtures has been stolen from the trains.
I put this paragraph up for all those people who have not experienced this sort of thing first hand and cannot accept that the single biggest obstacle to ending poverty in Africa is the nature of African nation states. Until that changes, sending aid under all but the most controlled circumstances is more often than not either subsidising the very people who cause the problems in the first place or, at best, flushing 90¢ on the dollar down the toilet in terms of helping the people you really want to benefit from your largess.
The solution? Good question, but it sure as hell is not more of the same. In Africa even more than most other places, truly, the state is not your friend.
It was written as…
The US taxman, the internal revenue service, argues that KPMG’s tax shelters between 1996 and 2002 cost the government $1.4bn in lost revenues.
But I prefer to see it as… “KPMG’s tax shelters between 1996 and 2002 saved the public $1.4bn which was used to generate productive economic activity”
British expats living in Spain are taking to handling their security themselves… and why not? Refusing to just throw your hands up in despair when the state proves unable to protect you is just acknowledging that you, not the state, are ultimately responsible for your safety. Vigilantes? Maybe, but why should that necessarily be a dirty word? Sometimes the reality is that ‘taking the law into your own hands’ is exactly the correct thing to do, and in any case these people are hardly hanging brigands they catch from the nearest lampposts.
Yet another Russian firm, Rambler Media, a search engine, has listed on the small-cap AIM stock market in London, preferring to hold its IPO in Britain rather than back home in Mother Russia. The story in the Daily Telegraph here gives a fairly sketchy outline of the listing but neglects to explore a possible broader reason for the listing.
Let me have a stab at it. Russian entrepreneurs are turning their backs on their home turf because they are worried about the possibility of their wealth being grabbed by the Russian state. Political risk is driving many Russian-owned firms to run their business affairs offshore.
Perhaps one should call this the “Yukos Effect.” In many respects the seizure of the oil firm’s assets by Putin’s Russian state is not quite the terrible smash-and-grab raid portrayed in some quarters – its owner was a decidely shady character – but it has certainly put a big chill into investors, pushing Russian shares down compared with their emerging market peers.
Expect to see plenty more launches of Russian firms on the British and other western stock markets for a while yet.
I will refuse to register for an ID card and will donate £10 to a legal defence fund but only if 10,000 other people will also make this same pledge.
– Phil Booth, NO2ID National Coordinator at PledgeBank
Deadline is 9th October 2005, 2,934 people have signed up, 7066 more are needed. Those in the UK, please sign up.
I will refuse to register for an ID card and will donate £10 to a legal defence fund but only if 10,000 other people will also make this same pledge.
– Phil Booth, NO2ID National Coordinator at PledgeBank
Deadline is 9th October 2005, 2,934 people have signed up, 7066 more are needed. Those in the UK, please sign up.
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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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