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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The indefatigible Radley Balko has a nice roundup of latest regulatory nuttiness from across the world, including my personal favourite, a rule in Italy stating that dog-owners must walk their furry friends at least three times a day. Tremendous stuff, the sort of law that would make the land of Julius Ceasar and Enzo Ferrari proud.
Joking aside at this lunacy, we are surely far beyond the point at which it is possible to subject this sort of regulatory mania to Monty Python-style satire. How on earth can one excite the anger of people against this sort of thing when it appears that the humourless berks who want to pass these rules feel no shame, no sense that they are infantilising the public?
It is time to Loose The Blogs of War and make some bureaucrat lives absolute hell. It seems the State is being even more annoying than I had imagined possible. I should have known better.
US Government idiocy is delaying Virgin Galactic; it is bureaucratically effing Richard Branson around and it is delaying the time at which you and I will be able to fly into space.
“At this point we are not able to even view Scaled Composites’ designs for the commercial space vehicle,” Mr Whitehorn (Virgin Galactic President) testified before the House committee.
“After US government technology-transfer issues are clarified, and addressed if deemed necessary, we hope to place a firm order for the spacecraft,” he said.
Mr Rutan added that the regulations have already affected financing for the project, which originally was to come from Mr Branson’s London-based Virgin Group.
“We have had to move away from the basic concept of this being a foreign-funded development,” he said.
I myself had believed that a UK company would not be treated so shabbily. As Burt Rutan quipped in a recent US Congressional hearing about commercial space flight:
“I thought Britain was a relatively friendly nation,”
So did I. Brothers-in-arms and all that? Remember who else is in Iraq? Anglosphere and all that rot? Hmmm?
PS: If you can be in the DC area May 19-22, drop by the International Space Development Conference. Burt Rutan and the Virgin Galactic President are both on the program. See you there!
I spent an enjoyable night at the theatre watching the musical, “Billy Elliott”, based on the film of the same name. It is the tale of a boy with ambitions to be a dancer, who lives in a northern English mining town during the time of the year-long miners’ strike of 1984-5 and is full of references to the political controversy of that time. How long ago it must feel to some of us who live in an era of far more peaceful industrial relations.
We have become so used to the relatively low level of strike action in Britain compared with the madness of the 1970s that some people in the audience watching folk cavorting on the stage must have wondered what the issues were about. My fiancee, who is Maltese, certainly did. She was actually appalled at the biased presentation of the then Thatcher-led government in the musical. I pointed out that this sort of bias is pretty standard boilerplate for the sort of leftist folk who tend to dominate the thespian world. It is easy for us, from our vantage point 20 years after the strike, to bask in the sentimental glow of affection for a lost world of pits, working men’s clubs, marching brass bands and the rest.
But at the risk of incurring the wrath of the commenters here, I did feel sympathy for a whole cluster of people who, faced with the iron laws of economics and a government determined to shake up the energy industry, faced losing their jobs and livelihoods. Even for a gung-ho proponent of laissez-faire like yours truly, the massive changes to our industrial landscape are not a story of unalloyed joy. It is a major issue for modern economies: how do we fully engage the energies of people who previously spent the years between 16 and 60 hewing coal out of the ground, riveting ships or working on car assembly lines? I cannot help but wonder that some of the problems of modern society, such as the loutish behaviour of young men, for instance, has something to do with the fact that in years past, young men who were not academic high-fliers nevertheless had a source of pride in doing something productive and in the case of mining, frequently very dangerous.
That all said, it is to my mind a great sign of progress that we no longer expect tens of thousands of men to work miles under the ground to keep our ovens, street lights and heating systems working.
“Whom do I lobby to if I want to change international law? Whom do I vote for? If anyone knocks on your door between now and Thursday, ask ’em that. If they can come up with anything remotely within their jurusdiction, vote for ’em.”
– a Biased BBC commenter known as ‘Alton Benes’
This is interesting. Excerpt:
The controversy follows the publication by Science in December of a paper which claimed to have demonstrated complete agreement among climate experts, not only that global warming is a genuine phenomenon, but also that mankind is to blame.
The author of the research, Dr Naomi Oreskes, of the University of California, analysed almost 1,000 papers on the subject published since the early 1990s, and concluded that 75 per cent of them either explicitly or implicitly backed the consensus view, while none directly dissented from it.
Dr Oreskes’s study is now routinely cited by those demanding action on climate change, including the Royal Society and Prof Sir David King, the Government’s chief scientific adviser.
However, her unequivocal conclusions immediately raised suspicions among other academics, who knew of many papers that dissented from the pro-global warming line.
They included Dr Benny Peiser, a senior lecturer in the science faculty at Liverpool John Moores University, who decided to conduct his own analysis of the same set of 1,000 documents – and concluded that only one third backed the consensus view, while only one per cent did so explicitly.
Dr Peiser submitted his findings to Science in January, and was asked to edit his paper for publication – but has now been told that his results have been rejected on the grounds that the points he make had been “widely dispersed on the internet”.
Well, they will be now.
I have for a long time wanted to know not just about global warming itself, but about the alleged expert consensus concerning its man-madeness. This should stir up a good discussion.
There is a tendency among free marketeers to say that global warming is all nonsense, not for the good reason that they actually think it all nonsense, but because they see it being used to establish a world government, which they oppose for other reasons. And I am sure that many who insist on the reality of global warming and of its man-madeness do so because they want a world government, which they favour for other reasons.
Yet there is no logical reason why one should not be a free marketeer who believes in the reality of man-made global warming, or a world governor who thinks it is all hooey.
Personally I am a free marketeer, and a sceptic on global warming, in the sense of not being persuaded that it is happening catastrophically, or that it is man-made. Note: a sceptic, rather than a disbeliever. I am a global warming agnostic rather than a global warming atheist. (And I think the religious vibes of this debate are all too real. The Environment seems to have replaced God for a lot of people.) I genuinely want to learn more about this alleged horror, on the off chance that I might be able to climb down off the fence, in one direction or another.
Question, what measures should a free marketeer who believes for sure that global warming is taking us all to catastrophe, is man-made, and is reversible, favour?
I say: develop technology more. Let us all get a lot richer. Meanwhile, devise a technical fix for the damn thing. And then rattle a big tin and do it. All the while arguing about it in forums like this one, and on the internet generally. (Interesting how the internet is undermining unacknowledged bias in the specialist science media as well as in things like CBS.)
But then, I favour most of that anyway, even if global warming and its man-madeness are hooey.
With the price of crude oil holding over $50 per barrel, how long will it be before the more flexible parts of the Green movement start arguing that nuclear power is actually not such a bad idea after all?
I ask this question because it seems to me that Britain, like a lot of other western nations, could be facing a Californian-style energy shortage fairly soon. It goes without saying that such an issue is completely off the political radar right now.
Comment away!
What’s on your mind tonight? Global warming? Economic collapse? African poverty? Islamic terrorism? Demographic decline? Mass immigration? The rise of China? The fall of Europe? Avian flu? AIDS?
Well, none of that matters to me right now. I am content to float aimlessly in the warm bath of deep, spiritual joy that I have been immersed in since Saturday afternoon when I finally got to see my beloved Chelsea clinch the Premier League Title.
I have never been here before. The last time Chelsea lifted the crown was in 1955, several years before I was born. In my 37 years of devotion to this club I have known pain, disappointment, frustration, humiliation, exasperation and occasional (and infuriatingly short-lived) elation. The term ’emotional rollercoaster’ does not even come close.
Yet, on Saturday afternoon, all those years of hurt just seemed to melt away like April snow. My ‘ugly duckling’ team has grown into a beautiful swan and (for the moment at least) nothing else matters.
Colour me happy. Very happy.
Globalisation does funny things:
Former Baywatch star David Hasselhoff has been named international star of the year at the Bollywood movie awards in Atlantic City in the US.
He received the award because his shows, including Knight Rider, are among the most popular on Indian TV.
That is the BBC story. I also recommend this Reuters report on the event, which packs a lot of information into a small space. Such as, that:
Rani Mukherjee won the best actress award for her role “Hum Tum.”
What does Hum Tum mean? Is it a medical condition? Or is that the name of Rani Mukherjee’s character?
And I did not know that they have Bollywood awards in Atlantic City. What is that about?
Says Reuters:
The event was held in the old U.S. East Coast gambling resort of Atlantic City as part of Bollywood’s bid to be a global force in cinema.
Interesting. And I did not know this either:
Bollywood churns out around 1,000 movies a year but despite a fan base that extends to the Middle East, Europe and Asia, few movies make money and the industry is under financial pressure. Bollywood films have not had much commercial success in America.
But Shammi Kapoor, who was given a lifetime achievement award, said better technology was leading to more and better films. “They’re getting to be more topical,” he added. “They aren’t the happy, happy movies of yesteryear.”
Indians will soon be complaining that Bollywood is becoming a fifth column Frankenstein’s laboratory Trojan Horse turncoat snakepit of anti-Indianism that panders to the global market and apes its worst excesses.
A few days ago I sat down to write an article about this election that is coming up, to try to explain why neither I, nor the other Samizdatistas, nor, apparently, very many of the British electorate, were getting very excited about it. Last time around, the voter turn-out was way down, and they are predicting the same thing again only more so.
However, I think it is important to distinguish between boringness and the decline of the overall vote, because an election can still be extremely exciting for those who remain excited by it, yet turn off lots of others by the million. Witness recent Presidential elections in the USA.
So, in this posting I will concentrate on the decline in the British voter turn-out in successive general elections, and speculate about why this has happened.
In order to try to understand this, I googled my way to this short piece, which I found very informative.
It shows several things. First, it shows that the vote has indeed declined. See the first graph of voter turn-out for each general election since the war.
Second, it explains where. Basically, the voter decline has been most severe in the Labour inner-city strongholds. The voting decline is largely a working class – or perhaps one should say ex-working class – phenomenon.
What gives? Why are these people not voting as much as they used to?
Let me rephrase the question by turning it upside down. Why did they ever bother to vote in such huge numbers in the first place?
I think the answer is that they voted because people who cared about them, and were of use to them, asked them to and told them to. A sociologist would say that they were all members of a voting tribe, for whom voting was a norm. An economist would say that they voted in exchange for favours that fellow tribesmen gave to them. In practice, such things are but different facets of the same thing, reinforcing one another to the point where separating the two notions becomes impossible.
Not that Britain’s working class voted Labour in the nineteenth century. There was no Labour. But they did vote. Individual interest and collective values, tribal and national, both pushed them towards voting, in huge percentages. With the rise of Labour, working class votes flowed towards Labour, but never completely. There were always millions of working class Conservative voters. But this posting is about the total number of votes cast, not who they were cast for. → Continue reading: Voting decline and the two welfare states
How little coverage there is of this scandal, no?
When was the last time a felony fraud investigation into the campaign of a sitting Senator and presumptive Presidential nominee was almost totally ignored by the press?
This looks pretty open and shut to me, at least as far the fraud part goes. The only real question is whether the candidate knew, and that puts the candidate in the position they so frequently find themselves in – they either knew what was going on in their campaign, in which case they are guilty and unfit for office, or they didn’t know what was going on in their campaign, in which case they are incompetent and unfit for office.
Wired reports that a California bill is moving swiftly through the state legislature that would make it illegal for state agencies and other bodies to use the technology in state identification documents.
The bill, which California lawmakers believe is the first of its kind in the nation, would prohibit the use of radio-frequency identification, or RFID, chips in state identity documents such as student badges, driver’s licenses, medical cards and state employee cards. The bill allows for some exceptions.
The bill allows for a number of exceptions for the use of RFID, such as devices used for paying bridge and road tolls, ID badges used for inmates housed in prisons or mental health facilities, or ID bracelets and badges used for children under the age of four who are in the care of a government-operated medical facility.
The bill allows agencies to obtain additional exceptions to the ban if they can prove to the legislature that there is a compelling state interest to use it in certain situations and can prove that other, less invasive technologies would be unsuitable. The bill allows state agencies that already have RFID devices in place – such as the Senate and Assembly office buildings – to phase them out by 2011.
It would also outlaw skimming – which occurs when an unauthorized person with an electronic reading device surreptitiously reads the electronic information on an RFID chip without the knowledge of the person carrying or wearing the chip.
Weapons of mass destruction are a great force for human fellowship.
– Brian Micklethwait
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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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