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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This is an excellent story. I got to it from here.
A bag of bills stolen from a casino was snapped up by beavers who wove thousands of dollars in soggy currency into the sticks and brush of their dam on a creek in eastern Louisiana.
“They hadn’t torn the bills up. They were still whole,” said Maj. Michael Martin of the St. Helena Parish Sheriff’s Office.
The money was part of $70,000 to $75,000 taken last week from the Lucky Dollar Casino in Greensburg.
Is there not some kind of law saying that you are not allowed to do this kind of thing in the USA? No doubt the beavers have by now appointed a lawyer to represent their interests. An eagle perhaps? Never mind.
A few years ago I read of lower spine stimulation by a doctor working with paralyzed patients. It had ‘interesting’ effects when done in just the right spot. Another, or perhaps the same doctor, Stuart Meloy, a Winston-Salem, North Carolina anesthesiologist and pain specialist, has been experimenting with an FDA approved stimulation device for lower back pain. At least one woman in his pain trial had breathtakingly enjoyable orgasms along with the pain abatement.
Other work I have read reports there is a lower spinal nerve area which controls the timing of ejaculation in men. Perhaps it is the same? The article does not say. Dr. Meloy has completed an initial medical trial on the use of the stimulator, now dubbed the ‘orgasmatron’, by women with orgasmic dysfunction. According to women in the trial, it works exceedingly well.
It may beat the knickers off a vibrator, but at $17,000 for surgical implantation this will definitely be a rich girl’s toy. I wonder if anyone has asked Woody Allen for a comment?
The ‘mainstreaming’ of the blog phenomenon continues apace as more applications for blogging start to join political prognostication, cultural commentary, demimonde diaries (warning: X-rated), technical tantrums, hitting things with hammers and paeans to beloved pussycats. New neighbourhoods of the blogosphere are springing up every day.
And now an independent Hollywood movie called Blowing Smoke, which is still undergoing some final post production editing, has set up a blog to which the director, producer and cast members have started to post, talking about the extremely politically incorrect nature of the movie.
The blog is still in its very early days, the site is still being tweaked and the users are at the stage where they are just getting to grips with blog publishing software but I think this could quite interesting if blogs like this catch on. As a movie enthusiast myself I would love to get more peeks behind the scenes and not just the same old marketing agency hype.
A remake of Do They Know It’s Christmas? has just been recorded.
Some of the brightest stars of British pop and rock music recorded a new version of Do They Know Its Christmas? yesterday, 20 years after the original became an international hit and raised millions for famine relief in Africa.
[…]
Chris Martin from Coldplay, Will Young, the Pop Idol winner, Justin Hawkins, frontman for The Darkness, Ms Dynamite and Joss Stone, the soul singer, were among the host of stars to attend.
It says everything about Band Aid, the original version, that what is still remembered as if it was yesterday are the various performances and pronouncements made by those pop stars, but that little attention is spared to even ask what exactly, if anything, was achieved with all that money.
Consider this, from a piece in the Spectator by Daniel Wolfe a few weeks back:
Geldof was the front man, and he has played his part to perfection, then and ever since. This is not to impugn his motives: Geldof is undeniably charming and sincere, but that does not mean that what he says is holy writ. He told the international media that agencies had to trust the representatives of the Mengistu government, thus seeming to deny, by implication, that the aid operation was being used by that same government. Yet the places where the aid was distributed, and the conditions under which it was distributed, were determined by Mengistu. There is something remarkably patronising in the assumption that an African dictator – as ruthless and cunning as they come, a survivor among survivors – might fail to see an opportunity when it was staring him in the face.
As it turned out, Mengistu knew a hawk from a handsaw. In 1984–85, up to a billion dollars’ worth of aid flowed into Ethiopia. Thousands of Western aid workers and journalists flew in with it. The regime ensured that the visitors converted their Western dollars to the local currency at a rate favourable to the government: in 1985 the Dergue tripled its foreign currency reserves. It used this influx of cash to help build up its war-machine, it commandeered aid vehicles for its own purposes and, by diverting aid supplies, helped feed its armies. The UN in Addis Ababa, which was co-ordinating the aid operation, denied that the level of diversion was significant. Later on, it became clear that a significant proportion of the relief food in Tigray – the epicentre of the famine – was consigned to the militia. The militias were known locally as ‘wheat militias’.
Above all, the government used the aid operation to support its military strategy: it saw food aid as both a tool for consolidating control over disputed territory and as bait for luring people from rebel-held areas into government territory…
And so on.
And now? Another war. Another famine. Another generation of popsters eager to help. I do not blame them, not the younger ones. They want to help. They like singing and playing their guitars, for this is what they do. If they are hoping for the best as a result of their efforts, rather than fearing the worst, this is hardly their fault. They mean well.
Geldof, on the other hand, ought to have learned something by now. Twenty years ago, he gouged a ton of money out of everyone, and became a secular saint. This time around, the assumption he still seems to be basing all his efforts on is that although flinging money at Africa may not do as much good as it might, it surely cannot do any great harm. But alas, if a lot of the ‘aid’ goes to the people who are causing a lot of the misery out there, then his ‘aid’ may indeed do some serious harm.
While checking out the special offers that British supermarkets have on at the moment, I found myself at Somerfield‘s website a few minutes ago. Despite all of the nonsense that has come from the British government over the years, and especially in recent months, I was still shocked when I read a link asking Somerfield customers to register their views on the government’s plans to ban buy one get one free offers. Surely even this nanny government would not come up with so ridiculous and controlling a measure, I thought.
Well, I thought wrong – they are indeed that mindbogglingly dumb and power-mad, and plan to do exactly that. So, businesses can forget being free to offer their customers bargains on foods the government deems ‘unhealthy’. (The state apparently has no idea that it is possible to consume those evil ‘unhealthy’ foods in moderation and still be a healthy individual. Not that it matters, since the state has already decided that the average citizen is too stupid to choose what to put into his or her own mouth, and that our entire society should be dumbed down in order to compensate it, no matter the effects on commerce and personal liberty.)
I am in general an optimist, but when it comes to the government’s fetish for domination of individuals, I am nothing but a pessimist. In the mind of our legislators, the opinion of the average voter (voter, not person) seems all too similar to this parody by frequent Samizdata commenter Chris Goodman:
Food ought to be banned, or at least rationed by trained medical staff in public service centres, since people are not rational enough to use it properly. At the very least food should be labelled “Food can be bad for you”. Those who make billions of pounds growing and distributing food should not be allowed to give people what they want. It turns my stomach to think of all those multinationals making money out of producing delicious food. There ought to be a march against it. Think of the children! In a modern society politicians have a democratic mandate that decide what we should have for tea each day. I vote for the party that raises taxes in order to pay for more regulators.
As Dr Sean Gabb, a guy who says much I disagree with but who hits the nail on the head on this issue, puts it:
Whenever the government does something for us, it takes away from our own ability to do that for ourselves. This diminishes us as human beings. Better, I suggest, a people who often eat and drink too much, and who on average die a few years before they might, than a people deprived of autonomy and shepherded into a few extra years of intellectual and moral passivity.
At the rate Britain is going, you might think we have a large crop of intellectually and morally passive octogenarians to look forward to in a few decades’ time. Sadly, I have no confidence whatsoever that these restrictions on personal and commercial freedom will produce the results desired by the government – except, of course, for more power in the hands of the state. Woe betide the fools who vote for these people, and those of us who will not but who will suffer at their hands regardless.
This is a very odd piece of reportage, from Spiegel Online:
Finally some news out of Holland that doesn’t have to do with the religious violence that has gripped the country for the last 10 days: The Dutch cabinet has decided on a March 2005 withdrawal of the country’s 1,350 troops in Iraq. Dutch Defense Minister Henk Kamp made the announcement on Friday afternoon.
What, not anything to do with it? Surely the Dutch cabinet at least hopes that Dutch Muslims will be slightly less angry about everything now, even if the actual decision to bring the boys home was made either before all the domestic rowing, or during it but for genuinely unrelated reasons.
And some will certainly argue that there is a connection, so there is your connection right there.
I do not say that the religious violence was the sole cause of the withdrawal, merely that these are definitely inter-woven news stories.
“The flat tax makes sense” says The Daily Telegraph this morning, in an editorial which coincides with the release of the Adam Smith Institute report on this. In the US, President Bush has identified tax reform as one of his top three priorities – along with pension and court reform – for his second term. And many of his advisers are keen for him to tear up the thousands of pages of the federal tax code and replace it with a single tax rate of 17 per cent, and even that payable only on incomes over $36,000. Every time in the past that the US has slashed its tax rates – under Coolidge, Kennedy, and Reagan – it has enjoyed a boom, and the US Treasury has actually raked in more taxes, and with the richest taxpayers contributing a far greater proportion. So this idea seems like an all-round winner.
Bush must be cheered by what he sees in other countries, too. A number of the EU’s new members, like Slovakia and Estonia, have gone for the flat tax. So has Russia and the Ukraine. Hong Kong too. Even China is thinking about it.
There’s a good deal of interest here in Britain too. That’s partly because our clever Chancellor of the Exchequer has made the tax code so complicated that nobody understands it. Tolley’s Yellow Tax Guide, the professionals’ bible on the UK tax system, now runs to an unliftable 7000+ pages across four volumes. People are hungry for the change. And so, in both the UK and US, it’s worth pushing for.
Update: Poland is bringing in the flat tax too.
There is an interesting article on Reuters about how the vast Indian film industry, or ‘Bollywood’ as it is widely known, is reflecting something of an improvement in relations between India and its neighbour, Pakistan. The article says that Pakistanis, once badly portrayed in Indian films, now get a more rounded image.
It is always unwise to make big conclusions about a few examples of popular culture, but bear in mind that in nations like India, the movie industry has enormous influence, particularly over the young. And if millions of young Indian people increasingly come to look at their Pakistani peers as regular, ordinary folk, then something very positive is happening in one of the fastest-growing movie and entertainment businesses in the world. It is all the more heartening given that only a few years ago the airwaves were thick with fears about a major military clash between India and Pakistan over the disputed territory of Kashmir.
Globalisation in action, perhaps?
Everyone is entitled to their sensibilities, however wacky, just so long as they do not try to make them the law of the land. As a result when I describe Los Angeles Times writer T. J. Simers as a ‘weird prude’, it is not with the sense of loathing, hatred and vitriol I would have used were I under the impression he was suggesting that his disquiet over a picture of a beautiful young woman in a pair of shorts (and presumed wish to see people share his puritan values regarding women) be reflected in the law of the land by imposing censorship.
But a ‘weird prude’ is indeed what I think he is. Whilst I see that bizarrely the age of consent in the benighted state of California is 18, in the vast majority of the world and even in much of the USA, the age at which one is permitted to engage in sex is 16. Moreover even if for some reason you conclude that the age at which young adults should actually have sex should be 18, surely only the most purblind would actually expect a 16 year old to be asexual even if they were abstinent.
So when an attractive physically active 17 year old has a picture taken wearing no less clothing than that in which millions of people have seen her win tennis tournaments…
… T. J. Simers asks, no doubt thinking the true answer is beyond the pale:
Now what do you think when I tell you the girl in the ad is 17 years old?
Well, yeah. The girl is question is Maria Sharapova and since she won Wimbledon, quite literally tens of millions of people know exactly how old she is. And what do I think? I think “Nice legs! What a babe”. I am, distressingly, old enough to be her father, but that does not change the fact she is a very attractive young woman. So what?
He continues:
Sharapova may or may not be the most mature 17-year-old the world has known, but she’s still 17. A kid. And if the message to young girls everywhere in the L.A. area is that sex sells – rather than Wimbledon championship tennis, shame on anyone who rewards AEG this week and takes their daughter to Staples Center.
Where were her parents? “There you go,” said Lindsay Davenport. “I wouldn’t do it, and I can tell you my daughter wouldn’t either.”
Well Lindsey Davenport was a great tennis player but I for one am also relieved she never struck such poses, though gallantry prevents me from elaborating what I think are the obvious reasons for that. But why oh why does Mr. Simers or Mrs. Davenport think a 17 years old should an asexual being? The advertisement was not one in which Maria Sharapova was offering to have sex with anyone, just displaying her athletic assets (her body) in a way in which many would find rather attractive. Being attractive does indeed sell so why pretend otherwise? Is the fact she is not pictured in the act of playing tennis somehow make her sexuality more obvious than these…
  Clearly this is not a young woman who is in denial regarding the fact she is a sexual being and hardly seems like some bewildered victim of heartless ad man dressing her up as Lolita. I rather doubt the camera man had to wrestle a teddy bear out of her arms to get her to strike that pose. For T.J. Simers to find the WTA image offensive is perverse and suggests to me that he must have some quaint notions of what 17 year olds are really like and how people should perceive them.
Millions and millions of people are married or in long term sexual relationships by the time they are 17 and many of those are also parents, which suggests that the peculiar notion of infantilising young adults and calling them ‘kids’ for as long as possible is rather far off the mark.
I think what really made this whole thing seem so daft to me was that I have just got back from an interesting exhibition about the Crimean War which features an account of a 14 year old who had accompanied the British forces on that campaign and it all really does make some of the modern notion of a strict division between adulthood and childhood seem truly preposterous when talking about a worldly 17 year old Russian woman who, if you have ever heard her interviewed, is obviously no fool.
There is something profoundly odd about the mindset of a certain ilk of conservative.
Alaa of the Messopotamian has some choice words about the hellspawn of Fallujah and how our troops should deal with them:
For the valiant soldiers doing battle in Falujah today: like the medieval knights, you have engraved on your shields severed heads of kidnapped victims, murdered children, the hundreds of thousands of the dwellers of mass graves. You are the instruments of the Lord’s retribution. Have no mercy on this vermin, they do not deserve any.
God bless you and protect you for you are doing his work.
It seems the enemy forces are turning more and more to Saddam’s old tried and true methods: threatening and killing children, the elderly and even pregnant women. Iraqi’s would like to see the lot of them off to a very deep location with an exceedingly tropical climate.
The Adam Smith Institute will be hosting an event called Democracy & the Blogosphere next Tuesday 16th November. The speakers will be Stephen Pollard, William Heath, Sandy Starr and yours truly.
The event is ‘jacket and tie’ at 6:15pm and will be followed by a reception at the ASI at 23 Great Smith Street, London, SW1P 3BL
Anyone who would like to come along should send an e-mail for an invitation.
No interrupting when I am interrupting!
– Adriana Cronin
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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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