Yes, of course you socialists are more concerned about the poor… your policies create so many of them!
– Part of a heated conversation overheard at another table during lunch at The Chelsea Bun restaurant
|
|||||
|
February 6th, 2004 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
 A leading British police officer has argued that heroin should be legalised, according to this report. To which I can only say – wow! Of course, the usual suspects in the political world and media will throw up their arms in horror, demand this officer’s resignation and so forth. But to those of us ‘loony libbos’ who have been arguing about the utter futility of the war on drugs for years and pointed out how it has massively boosted organised crime will be pleased that someone from the Boys in Blue has had the moral courage to make this point. Let me say straight off that I recognise that this is not a straightforward issue. Some who are sympathetic to the legalisation argument will nevertheless argue that our society has been so infantilised by the modern welfare state that it would be dangerous in the extreme to legalise what are seen as the most harmful drugs without at the same time making important social reforms. There is no doubt in my mind that if heroin were legalised straight away with no other parallel changes, a lot of vulnerable people could die. Any reform of public policy has to take that into account. But for far too long any discussion of drug policy has occured in a sort of fairy-tale land, in which a whole area of debate has been shut down in advance. I find it a sign of the times that it is now even thinkable for a senior police officer to broach the subject of legalisaing heroin in public. Ten years ago it would have been unimaginable. By the standards of British public life, that is progress. February 5th, 2004 | 42 comments - (Comments are closed)
Dana Rohrabacher (R-Ca) has just introduced a bill to clarify language in Federal law relating to commercial human spaceflight. I must admit there is much about this which truly grates on me as a libertarian. But the realist/entrepreneur side of me recognizes Dana is doing us a good turn. He is easing existing law to make life easier for X-Prize entrants. Under current law, every launch requires a license. Under the Rohrabacher bill, a single permit appears to cover all flights until the vehicle is ready for commercial operations. Ideally, I would like a single permit to cover all normal commercial operations as well. It seems silly to have vehicles which can take off and fly a suborbital job on a half-day notice and yet require months of effort for the approval to do so. I do not think commercial aviation would have accomplished very much under such a regime. Perhaps we can talk Dana into doing something about this problem when it arises in a year or two. The other interesting point is his treatment of liability limitation. He has continued the existing law in this area but has laid out a path for removing the government from this loop entirely. My libertarian side would say “get rid of it now”, but my spacer side recognizes the complexity of the insurance issues for the infant field. In a litigous society like the USA, human spaceflight would be uninsurable without this fiat ceiling… despite the fact that a SpaceShipOne or similar craft could do very little damage in the worst of cases. The details of the liability situation would require discussion of FAA regulations which are far too complex for me to reduce to a few bloglines. Let it suffice for me to say US X-Prize entrants are quite happy to have such limitation right now… and I am quite happy to see it phased out as insurance companies become more familiar with the Insurable Risks involved. I do not have time for a really detailed study of this law. I do know from personal contacts (an ex-staffer for one) Dana Rohrabacher is very familiar with the issues and is pro-commercial space. I have also heard he started off on the libertarian side of the fence but went Republican and drifted a bit out of our quadrant. Still, he is about as good as they come outside of Ron Paul. The issue is now open to discussion amongst the exceedingly knowledgeable space entrepreneur wing of the Samizdata commentariat. February 5th, 2004 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
While searching for an article I am absolutely certain I wrote but cannot find, I came across this article. I wrote it not long after 9/11 and I would not change a word of it. February 5th, 2004 | 72 comments - (Comments are closed)
One interpretation is that it is meant to indicate, from left to right, priority of the seats should go to any person with a broken arm, a person with a child, a pregnant woman or a person with an injured leg…  February 5th, 2004 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
The nuclear disarmament of Libya is moving more quickly than I would have imagined. According to Jane’s Defence Weekly on 30 January 2004:
Adding this to today’s revelations by Dr. Kahn in Pakistan makes three down and three to go of the potential sources of weapons grade fissionables. Well… plus an extra half to account for the thriving Russian black market. February 4th, 2004 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
There are some fascinating (if incomplete) bits of news from the Warbird world this month. The first one really made me sit up at my curry chicken, and it wasn’t because of the spices: a Ju-87 Stuka has been added to the UK civil register! It is another Russian front recovery. There is very little other information about this as yet. It could be corroded parts at the start of a ten year restoration or it could be in the paint shop and weeks from rollout. Your call. The other item was quite as stunning, not because of uniqueness, but due to the amazing state of the newly recovered airframe. An Me-109e-7 (upgraded from a -1) has been pulled out of a Russian lake where it landed on the ice 60 years ago. The airframe is in such incredibly good condition that the yellow nose is not only visibly yellow… it is Yellow. I’ve never seen the like of it. This Emil has been returned in carefuly packed bits to the UK and is now on sale. The project is a real steal for any warbird fan with a million or so burning a hole in their pocket.  A Bf-109g-6 Gustav at NASM Photo: Copyright D.Amon all rights reserved The sheer number of WWII airframes sourced from Russian crash sites over the last decade is nothing short of astounding. It also humbles one. The air battles on the Western Front pale to insignificance when set against the hordes thrown into the aerial meatgrinder of the East. February 4th, 2004 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
Reproduced below is the text of yesterday’s press release from the Libertarian Alliance:
Perhaps that is now how they think of themselves. February 4th, 2004 | Comments are closed
Reproduced below is the text of yesterday’s press release from the Libertarian Alliance:
Perhaps that is now how they think of themselves. [This article has been cross-posted to White Rose.] February 4th, 2004 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
One of the many things I love about novelist Ayn Rand is her idealistic view of the human form, especially when shorn of its drag-down weight of socialist commitment. This view of humanity is best portrayed, I think, in her stunning short book, Anthem, especially when Randian hero Equality 7-2521 is described by his lover, Liberty 5-3000, as being beautiful. Equality 7-2521 then re-christens himself Prometheus, after the Greek deity who created mankind in the image of the Gods. Anthem is a marvellous book, and I’m glad to see that Boston airport’s Terminal E shopping mall was carrying so many copies, on a recent visit to the socialist wonderland of Massachusetts. You very rarely see this lesser-known Randian masterpiece in UK bookshops. What you also rarely see on blogs like Crooked Timber, another socialist wonderland, is an acknowledgement that mankind is of itself a wonderful thing. With a site name based directly on the Kantian principle that mankind is intrinsically flawed, its thirteen professors of economics, philosophy, politics, and sociology, work to the premise that we feeble creatures of mankind need an overarching social democratic system to live by, as a consequence of our crookedness. Oh, how Ayn Rand would have applauded this use of Kantian philosophy. → Continue reading: Crooked Timber – An anthem to marxism February 4th, 2004 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
Ever since I struck the chords of some of my libertarian friends with my Libertarian Alliance piece entitled The Fixed Quantity of Wealth Fallacy, I and several of the friends have been on the lookout for new uses for the phrase “fixed quantity of [insert new something whose quantity is not fixed] fallacy”. Well, here is another. See title above. The beauty of the FQ?F is that all you have to do is state it. Much of the argument is made simply with the phrase. Jobs. Happiness. Travel. Linoleum. Blogging … The point is that simply altering the price of something massively increases the demand for it. And when economists talk about demand, they are not merely discussing potential consumers standing about with stupid plackards and stamping their feet and getting in a rage – as in political ‘demand’ – they mean actual ‘effective’ demand, demand that counts for something, demand with cash to back it up. Just to get the linking thing out of the way, I here give thanks to two recent articles which stirred me into saying what follows, one the already much linked-to Wired piece about how Indian programmers are now turning Silicon Valley into a dust bowl, and the other being a piece in today’s New York Times in which you can see the beginnings of the dawning light in the Western Official Mind that this might not all be entirely bad news after all. So, let us think about this Fixed Quantity of Programming Fallacy. It applies, of course, to the row now raging about the way that those sneaky Indians are stealing all our – I use the words “sneaky”, “stealing” and “our” ironically – computer programming jobs. Now I do not doubt that there are many computer programmers in the West who will, in the short run and maybe if they can find nothing else to do in the longer run as well, suffer severely. But it is also true that the availability to the West of much cheaper Indian programming power will create massive new economic opportunities in the West, and everywhere else. Basically, what it means is that Western computer experts will have to stop writing programmes and start, well, demanding them. In less florid language, they will have to switch from writing programmes to writing specifications for programmes, from making programmes to saying what a new programme must do. At the moment it is simply assumed that ‘writing a computer programme’ is something that only someone very rich can afford to finance. → Continue reading: The fixed quantity of programming fallacy February 4th, 2004 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
Although the EU is expanding eastwards, clutching more of the nations of Eastern Europe to its regulating breast on May 1st, only Britain and Ireland will actually be welcoming the people of those countries as residents.
And yet even officials at the benighted EU admit…
On the purely non-scientific observational evidence of my own eyes, there do seem to be rather a lot of happy looking English blokes wandering around London with eye-widening tall blondes from east of the Oder-Neisse line, so that seems about right… which makes me wonder why the Netherlands is not welcoming the Eastern Europeans with open arms!
February 4th, 2004 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
|
   |
||||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||
Vitajte v Londyne!
Recent Comments