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Mark Steyn describes an incident that confirms my impression that the politicians are botching up Iraq.
During the Falklands War, a bayonet charge on enemy positions would have been publicly applauded by the Prime Minister, honours and medals would have been discussed and the British public would have been in doubt that the government and the military knew exactly what they were doing. We could agree or disagree with the objective or the means, but not the operational competence or the political will.
Where Iraq is going wrong is not that the military are incapable (unless they run out of ammunition, boots, flak-jackets etc). It is that military action will be undermined by political ‘arse-covering’. The resolution shown by troops is frittered away by Colin Powell and his cronies in the US, and by the Labour government in the UK. Powell looks more and more like his caricature in the Tim Burton movie Mars Attacks! played by Paul Winfield.
My view on Vietnam is that it would have been better if the US had not got involved after the French pull-out, given that they were going to do so eventually anyway, or that the US should have fought to win. I take a Barry Goldwater position rather than a Eugene McCarthy one.
It used to be Colin Powell’s position too.
The Cassini Space Probe has arrived in the vicinity of Saturn. As well as taking some breathtaking photos of Saturn, the probe is going to investigate some of the ringed planet’s moons. On June 11 Cassini flys past the moon of Phoebe.
These space probes are a frivolous use of taxpayer’s money, but we do at least learn something from them. The geek in me loves them but the libertarian in me isn’t quite so amused.
…3 days later than last year. The Adam Smith Institute has announced that this year’s Tax Freedom Day will be tomorrow, 30th May 2004.
The ASI calculates this every year, providing a useful measure of one of the ways in which the state reduces liberty, destroys wealth and lowers overall living standards.
As usual, Tax Freedom Day attracts quite a lot of media coverage from the usual suspects. I wonder if any voters are actually noticing?
Good luck to Iyad Allawi, the man who will, inshallah, be Iraq’s next Prime Minister.
Hopefully he will be given the external support he needs to stabilise the security situation sufficiently to allow more internal solutions to develop. Although it would be difficult to underestimate the struggle ahead, the situation is far from the hopeless one often portrayed by people with axes to grind which have very littloe to do with Iraq.
I am going to give a hard time to someone I like immensely, but sometimes, it must be done – more on which later. In this case, it is blogger Harry Hatchet, who has posted an online poll on banning “junk” food advertisements, along with his argument for why the state should step in so that he does not have to say no to his child when she asks for “bad” food from McDonald’s.
I will quote Dr Sean Gabb on the “obesity epidemic” (which might more accurately be described as a “sedentarism epidemic”):
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.
Lest you think that I am preaching to the converted here, I mention this to make a larger point: These ideas are nothing new to those who believe in the concepts of personal liberty and the free market and who reject the slave-to-the-state mentality that’s all too prevalent in western society. But it is worth remembering that not everyone accepts these truths to be self-evident. And, unless you only surround yourself with those who agree with you on every single issue, sometimes (just sometimes!) the people who reject such truths will not be total idiots who are not worth engaging in discussion. Sometimes they are, like Mr Hatchet, intelligent people with whom you are friendly and with whom it is often possible to find common ground.
In cases like this, when we are dealing with fantasy “epidemics” spun by the government and irresponsible media outlets, I think it is worth making the effort to find that common ground, even if it is only an inch. Labour MP Tom Watson once told me that reading blogs had led him to change his mind on ID cards; he was once in favour of them, but blogs like this one gave him a fresh perspective on what he previously thought to be an open-and-shut case, and his opinion changed. I did not need to hear this to know that persuasive writing – in this case, in the context of a blog – can actually persuade. But in order for people to be won over, some of us have to be bothered to fight the fight in the first place.
And in case anyone’s thinking that there is nothing that lefties like Harry Hatchet could ever change our minds about, I confess: I used to think that the output of British rapper Mike Skinner, aka The Streets, was not that bad, but thanks to Harry’s quoting of some choice lyrics, I now know otherwise.
On our trip to Geneva we encountered some interesting people. One of them was Stefan Metzeler, who is a co-founder of Pro Libertate in Switzerland. It was Stefan’s question (the seventh picture) to the panel consisting of the assorted tranzis, leftists and self-propagandists, that set the tone of the debate and demonstrated that the members of the audience are not all on the same side…
Among other things I have learnt that Stefan likes to practice what we preach – for the last three years he has been organising informal libertarian meetings called Assens & Mt. Pelerin and helping as many people from Eastern Europe to attend as possible. This year’s will fall on June 19-20th. This is what Stefan says about the event:
The most important aims are to:
- Show people from the ex-communist countries how things work here in Switzerland, which – as we all agree – is still the most liberal country in Europe and last but not least, not a member of the EU
- Get them to spread that information, which they will undoubtedly do
I believe the programme for the first day includes a visit to a local shooting range, instructing the novices in the art of firearm handling, followed by a lot of practice for all. I mean, how sound is that?!
So far, we’ve got three people from the Lithuanian Free Market Institute lined up, one student from Belarus and another, just graduated, from a university in Ukraine, all of whom I met last year at the ISIL event in Vilnius, plus some interest from members of a liberal organisation in Poland. None of them can come without financial help.
By plane, we can probably pay for at most two people. If four to six want to come, they will have to travel by car. Cost per person will be very reasonable, estimated at about $120 – $150 each, plus visa, for those from Belarus and Ukraine.
So far, a German businessman and I are each putting up about $400, plus some $200 promised from other participants.
Most of the participants from France, Switzerland and Germany are also short on money. As capitalists, we have to get serious about getting beyond the theoretical stage, I think.
Right, you heard it. We do not usually do this sort of thing on Samizdata.net but we think this is a worthwhile cause and are happy to publicise it. If you share this view, please feel free to hit our paypal button. (You’ll just have to trust us that Stefan gets it.) Anything that arrives there between now and 1st June, goes to bringing as many people from Eastern Europe to the Assens & Mt. Pelerin meeting.
We promise to publish how much money has been received and how it was used. We will introduce those who make it to the meeting from Eastern Europe and blog about their impressions of Switzerland and the ideas they encounter at the Assens & Mt. Pelerin.
Imagine the police surrounding a bank and telling the robber barricaded inside, “Just throw out your weapons; you can keep the money and the hostages!”
– Todd Skelton on Gadhafi’s “rehabilitation”.
Not everyone who reads this blog will be particularly keen to know what the new EUropean Parliament building in Brussels looks like. But if you would like to know about this, I have a posting up at my Culture Blog which starts with a huge aerial photo of the place taken by someone else, and then has twenty four thumbnail photos you can click on to get to bigger photos that I took myself of this vast building when I was myself in Brussels not long ago.
It has taken me more than two months to get around to exhibiting these photos, for which apologies, but I presumably things have not changed that much since I took them. Partly this was because until recently I had much to learn about how to do this – “thumbnails” etc. (merci Monsieur) – and partly it was that, even if you do know how to stick up a mass of these thumbnails, it is still (for me anyway) a very unwieldy process to actually do, and to actually arrange them in a semi-coherent order, especially since this was the first blog posting effort along these lines that I have attempted.
The building is a scarily impressive edifice, or rather, agglomeration of edifices. I really missed not having a wide angle lens. As it was, it was like trying to photograph an elephant in a crowd. All I could do was assemble lots of details (hence the need for lots of pictures), with only occasional views that got the bigger picture, and none of the whole thing.
Which is only appropriate, considering that this is the EU, and that this entire building is itself only a relatively minor part of the big EU picture, which is itself utterly impossible to get in one snap.
Scott Baines calls for the government to allow an fair debate on smoking.
There is conserable pubic debate at present about the role of government in regulating smoking. The Prime Minister has called for a “Big Conversation” on whether local authorities should be able to ban workplace smoking. Yet the government seems unwilling to allow a fair debate. Instead, it is hugely bankrolling one side.
Action on Smoking and Health, which calls for smoking to gradually be made illegal, received £177,640 last year from the Department of Health. It also received £136,936 from the Welsh Assembly. This is money earned by taxpayers, including the especially heavily-taxed smoker, which goes towards an organisation that persecutes them. Ash offers an entirely negative contribution to society. Its funding should be stopped.
Scott Baines
The summer movie season in the US used to start on the Memorial Day holiday, and the box office statistics used by the major studios until recently reflected this fact. However, ever since Twister was a big hit when released two weeks before Memorial Day in 1996, the studios have started rolling out their big summer movies starting from two weeks before Memorial Day. A couple of years ago, the box office statistics compiled by AC Nielsen EDI were adjusted to reflect this fact.
However, this year the first big summer movie was released three weeks before Memorial Day. (This may be a one off thing. Memorial Day is late in the month this year. Or perhaps the summer movie season is now always going to start three weeks before EDI tweaked the definition of summer again to take this into account. Perhaps in a few years “summer” will be statistically redefined to start in February). That first move was Universal’s Van Helsing. That was now three weeks ago, and we can start to see the first few indications of what the summer would be like.
The story of last summer has been told. Hollywood released lots of sequels, lots of high concept movies based on comic books, old television series, video games and theme parks. With one or two exceptions grosses were down from the summer before. There was lots of speculation as to whether the advent of DVDs meant that people were less likely to go and see movies in the cinema, or whether it just meant the year’s movies weren’t very good. Certainly, though, people were and are watching lots of movies on DVDs, and Hollywood was making unexpectedly immense amounts of money due to this, which sort of made up for the decline in box office revenues. (Of course, when the DVD format was introduced in the first place a few years back, a number of Hollywood studios waited a couple of years before releasing any movies on the new format. Studio people were frightened that the high quality digital nature of the new format meant that releasing films this way would make them more vulnerable to piracy, and they could not see any upside, as obviously all that would happen is that people would rent movies on DVD the way they had on VHS until then, and giving people a high quality digital experience at home would not cause them to rent or buy more movies. Obviously. Hollywood always runs away from new technology like this, and has an amazing inability to see upside in it. But the upside almost always seems to come).
Hollywood went into last summer believing that sequels were going to gross substantially more money than did the original films they were sequels to, but it didn’t happen and they get their noses bloodied a little. It takes two years for the lessons of a bad summer to sink in to Hollywood, but none the less this summer has fewer sequels and the like scheduled than last summer did. The lesson they should probably have learned is that sequels to good films can gross more than sequels to bad films, but the trouble with Hollywood being run by corporate types rather than people who genuinely love movies is that they are sometimes slow to see things like that.
One other thing that has been happening this year is what is often called “day and date” international programming. Traditionally, films were released in the US first, and would be rolled out throughout the rest of the world over a period of months. This is now happening less and less for big movies. Films are being released on the same weekend in most major markets. There are two reasons for this. The first is that Hollywood as always is afraid of piracy. Certainly they are losing some money to pirates. Once upon a time I was frequently offered illicit CD and VCDs and VHS tapes when walking down the streets of Asian cities, but if I wanted them in developed countries they would be harder to find. These days I cannot walk down Oxford Street in London without encountering someone selling illicit DVDs of movies current in the US that have probably not been released in the UK yet. Releasing movies in large swathes of Europe and Asia on the same weekend as in the US certainly reduces the window in which this activity is profitable, and this is the main reason given for the fact that there are now simultaneous worldwide releases.
But in reality this is more of a symptom than the cause. → Continue reading: The Summer Movie Season gets going
It is by now a familiar statement from anti-war folk that Saddam had no real links to Islamic terror groups of any consequence. The idea, dear boy, is totally incredible. The man, who after all was a “secular ruler” (conjuring up the image of the old bastard reading Voltaire of an evening). had a positive revulsion of Islamic religious extremism. To suggest a link is to fall prey to the fantasies of the great neoconservative/Zionist/whatever conspiracy now trying to rule the world. Right?
Well, no, actually. The Wall Street Journal has an article today setting out what it believes is rather a big lump of evidence pointing to terror links before and after 9/11:
One striking bit of new evidence is that the name Ahmed Hikmat Shakir appears on three captured rosters of officers in Saddam Fedayeen, the elite paramilitary group run by Saddam’s son Uday and entrusted with doing much of the regime’s dirty work. Our government sources, who have seen translations of the documents, say Shakir is listed with the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel.
This matters because if Shakir was an officer in the Fedayeen, it would establish a direct link between Iraq and the al Qaeda operatives who planned 9/11. Shakir was present at the January 2000 al Qaeda “summit” in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, at which the 9/11 attacks were planned. The U.S. has never been sure whether he was there on behalf of the Iraqi regime or whether he was an Iraqi Islamicist who hooked up with al Qaeda on his own.
Okay, I know what the responses will be. It’s the Wall Street Journal! You can’t believe these guys! etc, etc.
But stepping aside from this specific article, consider this following general scenario: you have a military dictator who loves taking his nation to the brink even at great cost; his military forces are seriously damaged from two devastating wars and a sanctions regime; he craves revenge and enjoys humiliating his foes. To whom does he turn to help hurt his great enemy, the United States?
Exactly. Why is it so crazy, so bonkers, to think that terror links probably did exist, and that, if it were possible, it was vital for the intelligence services of the Western powers to check those possibilities?
You may say, why does this really matter now? Well, to be frank, the argument that we need to “reshape the Middle East” always struck me as dangerously ambitious, and the costs of such a venture struck me as potentially prohibitive. That is one part of the isolationist position I have some sympathy for, a fact which might surprise some. (“Johnathan Pearce has gone wobbly!”) For me, though, what counted was the potentially deadly nexus of terror groups, mass weapons, and rogue states able and willing to offer harbour and support to such terror groups. My conscience is troubled at the thought that we might have attacked a nation of no serious threat to us. Well, if the latest stories turn out to be even half-true, then the evidence of Saddam’s malignity just got a lot, lot harder.
For those who have already visited White Rose earlier today and noticed that the article One for the heart, is missing. It was written for someone else and forwarded to me for information only. We hope to get it cleared with the publication for which it was originally destined and aim to re-post it tomorrow. Apologies to those who were inconvenienced.
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