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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Surprise surprise:
The renewable energy industry suffered a setback today with the publication of a report showing that electricity from offshore wind farms will cost at least twice as much as that obtained from conventional sources.
According to research carried out by the Royal Academy of Engineering (RAE), the cheapest electricity, costing just 2.3 pence per unit, will be generated from gas turbines and nuclear power stations, compared with 3.7p for onshore wind and 5.5p for offshore. The Academy also emphasised the need to provide backup for wind energy to cover periods when the wind doesn’t blow. The study assumed the need for about 65% backup from conventional sources, adding 1.7p to the cost of wind power, bringing its price up to two and a half times that of gas or nuclear power.
The other alternatives are: coal, which is about to get blamed for frying the planet and to be made illegal, here anyway; and: nuclear power, which is horrid horrid horrid and will never be allowed no matter how sensible they manage to make it.
Accordingly, it won’t be long before we all freeze to death. And since there will not be any electricity, we will not even be able to blog about it.
Prediction: the idiots who between them achieved this will then blame capitalism, for, er, exploiting people’s desire to stay warm, that is to say, not exploiting it enough, er, drivel drivel, shiver shiver, …
Actually, this is not all bad news. The bad news would be if there was no news about it all, and it was just happening. The story here is not merely that environmentalists are driving us all enviro-mental with their idiotically contradictory policies. It is that boring sounding people like the Institution of Civil Engineers are starting to get nervous, and even rather angry.
Nuclear engineers are getting in on the act too. Here is a bit lower down in that Guardian story:
RAE vice-president Philip Ruffles acknowledged that the findings may sound surprising, especially as the cost of nuclear decommissioning had been included in the research.
“The weakness of the government’s energy white paper was that it saw nuclear power as very expensive,” he said. “But modern nuclear stations are far simpler and more streamlined than the old generation and far cheaper to build and run.”
But the mad hippy lunatic scumbag tendency has no time for talk like that:
The British Wind Energy Association, who last year gave full backing to the government’s wind, questioned the reliability of the data which the RAE used: “BWEA assumes that the figures quoted for nuclear power are based upon reactors that are yet to be built and is not aware of any market experience that proves the costs claimed by the Royal Academy of Engineering,” it said.
But the reason there is no market experience of wind farming, surely, is because no one has yet expressed any desire for its product, give what it costs. With talk like that, the more lunatic your entrepreneurial scheme, the more it would be entitled to government money, so that it could acquire ‘market experience’. But maybe I have misunderstood the man.
Be that as it may, the real reason I included that last bit was the presence in it of the glorious phrase (from which a word must surely be missing): “gave full backing to the government’s wind”.
Here at Samizdata, we never give full backing to the government’s wind.
Jesus in Beijing: How Christianity Is Transforming China and Changing the Global Balance of Power
David Aikman
Regnery, 2003
“[W]e have realised the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity. That is why the West has been so powerful. … We don’t have any doubt about this (p. 5)”. Fifty three years after China went Communist, such is the view of a thirty-something Chinese social scientist in a top establishment in China’s capital. The former Chinese President, Jiang Zeming, asked what would be his last decree if it could be enforced, grinned and (according to an anecdote which cannot be dismissed out of hand), said, “I would make Christianity the official religion of China” (p. 17).
The first remark may not come as a shock to those who know their Weber and Tawney and combine it with a thorough disillusionment with Marxism, the presumed state of our Beijing academic. The second suggests that the ex-President was aware of the political U-turn, early in the fourth century, of Constantine the Great, son of the colleague of the Emperor Diocletian, last of the great Roman persecutors of Christians.
Aikman does not ask us to regard these reports as more than straws in the wind, but his own investigations lead him to state: “China is in the process of becoming Christianised … [i.e.] it is possible that Christians will constitute 20 to 30 percent of China’s population within three decades” (p. 285). His conclusion results from an intensive period of travelling and interviewing within China during 2002 and 2003 and an interest and residence in China off and on during the last three decades, including a stint as TIME’s chief in Beijing. He knows the language (though he also employs a translator) and, while plainly sympathetic to his subject, the state of Christianity in China today, is reticent regarding his own religious beliefs. → Continue reading: Christianity in China
I’ve just done a rather long posting on my Education Blog about a teacher called Francis Gilbert, who has written a book highly critical of government education policies. Put it this way, I classified the post under one of my most frequently used headings: “Sovietisation.” The guts of Sovietisation is when the measuring system imposed from the centre completely overwhelms the activity it is supposedly measuring. In the old USSR, people spent all their time fulfilling quotas, by hook or by crook, as opposed to doing useful work. Now, more and more teachers are pushing, and faking, children through exams. And as also happened in the old USSR, everyone knows that this is happening, but nobody except a few very unusual dissidents can afford to go out on a limb and admit it.
While I was linking to articles by and about Gilbert, and to his recent book, Kit Taylor was simultaneously emailing me, twice, about a radio performance that Gilbert did today.
Email one:
Teacher Francis Gilbert was on Radio2’s Drive Time programme this evening (wednesday 10th March), promoting his book “I’m a Teacher Get Me Out of Here!”
Though he described himself as being of the left and wanting equality, he delivered a tirade against a crushing bureaucracy he likened to something out of 1984, and said that he was disillusioned by “what the left had done.” Notably, as questioned why schools weren’t free to devise their own curriculums, something utterly uncontroversial as far as I’m concerned but seemingly unthinkable in today’s political climate.
Host Johnnie Walker even chipped in agreeably, pontificating that anything the government tried to run it messed up!
All this on primetime national radio. Cause for optimism?
And then, just as I was going to press (having included email one at the last minute), in comes email two:
Actually, now I think on Francis Gilbert something even more interesting in the interview.
It was along the lines of –
“I can go to the corner shop, and I can buy a good quality jam or a cheaper one. I have that option. But if I want my daughter [aged three] to learn french or classics, the choices aren’t available.”
If advanced by the Tories, I’d be unsurprised if such a notion were attacked as Thatcherite extremism. What’s interesting is that Gilbert’s comments were not apparently derived from ideological dogma, but the product of a “man in the street” intuitively questioning why a system that was working well in one aspect of his life wasn’t being applied in another that wasn’t.
As I think I may already have been quoted here as saying, we do have one rather big advantage over our opponents, which is that reality is on our side.
Some of the Serbian paramilitary ‘heroes’ responsible for the mass murder of 192 Croatians in Vukovar in 1991 have been put on trial in Serbia.
This is a welcome development as not only does it brings bring these people to account, it will require Serbian society and the Serbian state to confront what really happened. In the absence of an externally imposed ‘denazification’ process, this could be exactly what Serbia needs and perhaps the start of a process that will de-legitimise vile creatures like Vojislav Seseji and other nationalists who do not have the widespread opprobrium they deserve within Serbia itself.
War crimes trials far off in the Hague simply cannot have the same effect as trials within Serbia itself. Forcing the painful truth to be brought out for all to see has to be a good thing as far too many people with the blood of the Balkans on their hands are still relaxing in the cafés of Belgrade. Perhaps this is the first sign that their days are numbered, but it would be premature to just assume this will be the case. Nevertheless, these trials are a very good start.
I frikkin’ met an Ayatollah! a real life Ayatollah, I watched him eat a banana and then he put his hands on my shoulder and prayed that I get married soon, my mom was beside herself with joy and I just couldn’t stop laughing.
The heretic fagot getting a blessing from an Ayatollah. that is how great those four days were.
– Salam Pax
One of the best summaries of the travesty that lead to Martha Stewart being convicted of, well, lying to avoid self-incrimination, can be found on WorldnetDaily by Samuel Blumenfeld:
Stewart was acting on information given to her. She did not build her wealth on a career of insider trading. It was a one-time fluke which involved a relatively small amount of money. When federal investigators questioned her on this transaction, she said that she had a standing order for her broker to sell the stock if the price went below $60.00. Apparently, that was the alleged lie that the jury convicted her on.
Here was the federal government, which couldn’t protect us from the terrorist attack of 9-11 in which thousands of people were killed, trying to protect us from Martha Stewart. The alleged lies she told were not told under oath. She did not commit perjury. Apparently it is now a crime to tell a falsehood to a government investigator. That’s considered an obstruction of justice.
Whatever you may think of Stewart’s action, she did not kill anyone or rob anyone. Her action did not result in anyone else losing anything. In other words, unless you believe that citizens don’t have a right to tell a falsehood to a government official in defending themselves from self-incrimination, Martha Stewart committed no crime.
Read the whole thing. The sickeningly self-righteous chortling of the predators of the wealth destroying US legal establishment just makes the whole thing worse and make it clear to me what really makes the legal world go around. If some ambitious prosecutor who thinks nothing of destroying lives and livelihoods in order to advance their own careers decides you are going to be their stepping stone, watch out. The state is not your friend.
Devoid of inspiration, I looked in my library and found Soviet Communism – A New Civilisation by Sidney and Beatrice Webb. There is no question mark in the title of my 1937 Left Book Club edition, and it was “NOT FOR SALE TO THE PUBLIC” (as it says on the front). And a good thing too, I muttered, as I scanned through it, looking for something particularly vile and wrong-headed for you people to have a good chuckle and a good sneer at.
Imagine my surprise, then, to encounter a paragraph of complete truth. Admittedly I had to go to page 1122 to find it, but even so, don’t you think that this is really rather good?
We place first in far-reaching importance the complete discarding, as the incentive to production, of the very mainspring of the western social order, the motive of profit-making. Instead of admiring those who successfully purchase commodities in order to sell them again at a higher price (whether as merchant or trader, wholesale dealer or retailer). Soviet Communism punishes such persons as criminals, guilty of the crime of “speculation”. Instead of rewarding or honouring those (the capitalist employers or entrepreneurs) who engage others at wages in order to make a profit out of the product of their labour, Soviet Communism punishes them as criminals, guilty, irrespective of the amount of the wages that they pay, of the crime of “exploitation”. It would be difficult to exaggerate the difference that this one change in ideology (in current views of morality as well as in criminal law) has made in the manner of life within the USSR. No one can adequately realise, without a wide study of the facts of soviet life, what this fundamental transformation of economic relationships has meant, alike to the vast majority of the poor and to the relatively small minority who formerly “lived by owning”, or by employing others for profit.
The paragraphs that follow revert to the evil drivel of which this book mostly consists, as the elderly dupes try to explain how none of this did any harm. But even so, something of a surprise.
Bruce Schneier has a view essay in Wired about how all the money spent on security to turn the country into a fortress may make us feel better, but it doesn’t make us any safer. As most readers of this blog will know, Bruce Schneier is CTO of Counterpane Internet Security and author of Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World.
Many of the security measures we encounter on a daily basis aim pinpoint the bad guys by treating everyone as a suspect. The Department of Homeland Security counts on technology to come to our rescue: databases to track suspected terrorists, facial recognition to spot them in airports, artificial intelligence to anticipate plots before they unfold. But that creates a problem similar to the one you see when airport security screeners waste their time frisking false alarms. Terrorists are so rare that any individual lead is almost certainly a false one. So billions of dollars are wasted with no assurance that any terrorist will be caught. When an airport screener confiscates a pocketknife from an innocent person, security has failed.
…
Security always involves compromises. As a society we can have as much protection as we want, as long as we’re willing to sacrifice the money, time, convenience, and liberties to get it. Unfortunately, most of the government’s measures are bad trade-offs: They require significant sacrifices without providing much additional safety in return. And there’s far too much “security theater” – ways of making people feel safer without actually improving anything.
A lone (or so it often seems) voice of sanity and common sense – just what I needed to get me through today…
Islam’s Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora
Ronald Segal
Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2001
Race and Slavery in the Middle East: A Historical Enquiry
Bernard Lewis
OUP; 1994
To treat this subject it is really necessary, as Segal has done, to run through the history of Islam from Western India to Western Africa, for during the whole of the period of more than 1300 years black slaves have been acquired and traded increasingly with the spread of Islam – indeed, it might be said that one reason for the spread of Islam was trade, of which slaves were a considerable part.
In Islam’s Black Slaves Segal makes very clear the difference between the Islamic trade, and the use to which it was put, and the transatlantic trade that brought blacks to the Americas. He has already written a book about the latter subject, The Black Diaspora, and it is probable that he regards it as the greater crime. Slaves in the Islamic world were much more for domestic use and while in the Americas the imports were predominantly male, within Islam females outnumbered males by two to one, probably (though this is not mentioned explicitly) because slave-raiding involved killing the men to secure the women and children (as opposed to slave-trading with the black kingdoms on the African West Coast). Segal claims, however, that though the journeys of the slave-caravans were terrible, once the slaves had, so to speak, arrived at their final destination, their treatment was relatively humane. → Continue reading: Slavery under Islam
The other day I came across this article during some random Web surfing, which contained a fairly familiar conservative hammering of what is loosely defined as the Baby Boomer Generation, that portion of the mostly Western population now on the verge of hitting the age of retirement.
In essentials, the argument runs like this: baby boomers are self-obsessed, adopted some mind-bindingly dumb (mostly left) political views; undermined respect for any kind of authority; addled their brains with drugs during the infamous Sixties and now expect we younger folk to shoulder the burgeoning cost of keeping them in retirement. Blah, bloody blah-blah.
Yes, you may have guessed it – this writer (born in that greatest of years, 1966, about a month before England won the soccer World Cup) is not entirely sold on the conservative critique, even though I share some distaste at the dumb political and cultural stances that were taken by said generation. But one thing which I frequently note is this – the BB generation is often attacked for being self-interested and focussed on acquiring self-esteem. But wait a minute. As a libertarian and unashamed individualist, I have to ask: what is wrong with wishing to improve one’s life, exactly? After all, one of the most widely books in that stiff-necked era, that of the Victorians, was Samuel Smiles’ hymn to self-improvement.
Surely, anyone who believes their life is their own, and not that of the State, Volk, proletariat, God, Allah, or the Great Green whatever, will embrace the notion of self-improvement. After all, much of the libertarian movement we know today, with all its different strains, acquired a considerable amount of energy during the 1950s and 60s. David Friedman, for example, who is the son of Milton Friedman and a leading exponent of anarcho-capitalism, might be regarded as a baby boomer. A good number of those who were inspired by the ideas of author and philosopher Ayn Rand were baby boomers. The Libertarian Alliance’s own director, Dr Chris R. Tame, and LA editorial boss and Samizdata.net scribe, Brian Micklethwait, were of the boomer generation.
To put it another way, let us avoid the groupthink mentality that would bracket a whole generation under one heading. The BB generation contain a fair share of boobies, charlatans and fools. It also contains folk I greatly admire and am proud to call my friends.
That’s my basic rule: whatever the problem, the government’s a bigger one
– Mark Steyn
Information Week reports that the State Department plans to begin issuing passports with chips containing biographic information later in the year. Maura Harty, testified at a Congressional hearing Thursday that the United States needs to take the lead in issuing the new passports to encourage other nations to do likewise. Doing so, she says, will help secure our borders against terrorists and other potential troublemakers. Harty told member of the House Government Reform Committee’s hearings on the government’s US-Visit program, which requires many foreigners entering and leaving the United States to have their fingerprints and face electronically scanned.
We recognize that convincing other nations to improve their passport requires U.S. leadership both at the International Civil Aviation Organization and by taking such steps with the U.S. passport. Embedding biometrics into U.S. passports to establish a clear link between the person issued the passport and the user is an important step forward in the international effort to strengthen border security.
Of course, biometrics is foolproof and fingerprinting your citizens is going to improve border security how exactly?! Another example of a fallacy typical of the statists that if only we had total surveillance, then no crime, threat or terrorism would be possible. Balls, balls, balls.
Sorry for the outburst, it is just one stupid statement by a state official too many… Sadly, I am sure there are many more to come.
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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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