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.
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The Drug ‘War’ continues to dement US society in new and innovative ways that even a cynic such as myself find hard to credit. This is truly staggering:
Gun-toting police burst into a South Carolina high school, ordering students to lie down in hall ways as they searched for drugs. The commando-style raid has parents questioning the wisdom of police tactics. The raid occurred Wednesday at Stratford High School in Goose Creek, S.C. Surveillance video obtained by CBS Affiliate WCSC in Charleston shows the police waving their guns and searching lockers as students lie flat on their stomachs or sides. The school’s principal defends the dramatic sweep, caught on the school’s surveillance tape. Police came into the school with guns at the ready, ordered all students to lie on the floor and then handcuffed anyone who apparently didn’t comply quickly enough.
I am sorry, but some square headed jerks in blue shirts start waving guns around a bunch of children who are just going about their business at school, and it is reported that parents are “questioning the wisdom of police tactics”? Questioning the wisdom of police tactics? To quote that wit and sage Eddy Murphy, get the fuck outa here. I would be looking for some heads-on-spikes if a child of mine was subjected to that sort of treatment. How this incident has not resulted in angry mobs in the streets throwing rocks is beyond me. What does it take to really piss these people off?
So… attention all parents in Goose Creek: are you starting to have second thoughts about the wisdom of entrusting your children to state ‘care’ yet? Unbelievable.
And now class, today’s important lesson:
The state is not your friend.
Any questions?
via Catallarchy.net
This is big. I mean it is really big. It is so big I had to take time from paid work to pass it along.
A small entrepreneurial company, Changing World Technologies, has just extended the Petroleum age to infinity. That’s right. We aren’t going to run out of oil. Ever. To top it off, we won’t be adding more carbon to the atmosphere – we will just be recycling the same carbon stocks over and over again. Even better: we can tell OPEC to go rotate because fuel imports will become a thing of the past.
Does this all seem like fantasy? It did to me when I first heard about it, but the more I read the more convinced I am. The technology takes any carbon based waste, and I do mean any carbon based waste and turns it into high quality oil, water and some minerals at 85% energy efficiency. 15% of the output supplies enough energy to run the process. It’s not hype and vu-graphs either. They’ve got a real pilot plant going up beside the Butterball Turkey plant in Carthage, Missouri. Oil from turkey offal.
They estimate the US could supply all of it’s oil needs from recycling. It’s not a technology likely to get buried either. The large oil companies can phase into the new technology with hardly a dropped dividend.
It is also of interest for the ‘Small is Beautiful’ crowd and those of us in the Space settlement community. The technology scales both up and down. If you live in the middle of the Australian outback, you can chuck your shite and animal carcasses into the hopper on one end… and fill up the old diesel RV from the other fifteen minutes later.
Julian Simon is giggling in his grave.
Carthage, Missouri Commercial Plant at Butterball Turkey factory is operational.
Photo: Changing World Technologies
The economic, strategic, social and libertarian implications of this are huge. I’ve not the time to write down the mass of thoughts whirling around in my head right now, but I am certain I can depend on our literate readership to expand on the possibilities and write them up for me. See you in comments when I’ve some spare time!
One of our readers has pointed out this article about the current status of the venture. The first plant is online and others are now funded and in planning.
In Zimbabwe, things are just getting worse and worse:
An estimated three million Zimbabweans are seeking sanctuary in neighbouring South Africa, while 400,000 have gone to Mozambique. Anything from 10 to 20 per cent of the Zimbabwean population have left their homes to seek job security and wages in neighbouring lands.
Trains, buses and lorries have been used by the South African authorities to deport 498,321 since the crisis began in 2000, according to official figures, although it is believed that only one in six illegal immigrants is caught.
Even desperately poor Mozambique is now attracting Zimbabweans. Thousands have streamed over the mountainous eastern border into Manica province, hoping to be paid in any currency other than the Zimbabwean dollar.
Ironically, many black Zimbabweans are leaving for Mozambique to work on farms being run by the same white farmers kicked off their land by Mr Mugabe.
Zimbabwe may hate the white farmer, but scores have been welcomed into Mozambique by the authorities keen to lure agricultural specialists, especially in the tobacco sector.
Botswana, too, has also been inundated. A rare African economic success story, it is now under threat from hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants. It is dramatic proof of the regional chaos caused by Mr Mugabe’s chaotic rule.
So is anything being done about this horror story? According to Zimbabwe “Information” Minister Jonathan Moyo, something is being done:
“Britain, America, Australia … and New Zealand are truly and seriously committed to regime change, they seek a regime change in Zimbabwe,” he said.
“They are pursuing it through acts of economic sabotage and they use weapons of mass deception, (under the cover of) instruments of democracy, human rights rule of law, good governance, to sound reasonable,” Moyo said.
“They steal our foreign currency earnings, they attack even our own currency to the point of saying it’s scarce, to blame the government, to seek regime change, and they drive the parallel market,” he told top government, economic and civic officials seeking solutions to the economic malaise.
We can hope, I suppose. But you get the feeling that although lots of people know what’s going on out there, nobody important in the world has this horror story near enough to the top of their to-do list for anything to be done about it at all soon. Only when, having destroyed Zimbabwe itself, the Mugabe regime destroys itself, as it presumably will when there’s nothing else left to destroy, will this horrible chapter in human affairs draw to a close.
The final paragraph of this second story, originally from Agence France-Presse, is a classic of Gallic gallows humour:
The two day conference convened by government and business heard yesterday that Zimbabwe’s economy was being undermined by contradictory and ineffectual government policies, corruption, greed and the country’s negative image abroad.
Yes how true. Government policy isn’t being imposed nearly firmly enough. If government officials were murdering people selflessly and ungreedily, instead of how they’re doing it now, and if Zimbabwe could shed its negative image abroad, all would be well.
What would happen if the Sahara Desert went communist? – For fifty years nothing, then a shortage of sand. Remember that old joke? Well, have a read of this, from the BBC earlier in the week:
Saudi Arabia has reportedly imposed strict border checks to enforce a ban on the export of sand.
There are fears that the growing demands of the construction industry could lead to a shortage in the desert kingdom.
The Arab News newspaper reports that neighbouring Bahrain needs to import large quantities of sand for reclaiming land from the sea.
Demand is also expected to grow as the process of reconstruction in Iraq gathers pace.
Although sand remains plentiful in Saudi Arabia, construction experts say the high costs of bagging and transporting make exploiting it difficult.
Experts have told the newspaper that if a mechanism could be devised to move sand from the vast desert region known as the Empty Quarter, it could be a very profitable proposition.
As the paper points out, there is more sand in the kingdom than oil.
Cement is also in high demand, the report says, with many cement factories having to expand their production capabilities to meet domestic demand.
We speculated here that if the Americans went into Iraq they could then put pressure on Saudi Arabia. Now the American plan is revealing itself. “I know it sounds crazy, but guys, here’s the plan. We’re going to suck all the sand out of the place. We’ll have them over a barrel.”
To be more serious, I guess the thing about about sand, compared to oil, is that sand can’t, unlike oil, be controlled. Oil extraction requires expensive infrastructure manned by a highly skilled workforce. Once it’s out of the ground, it can still then be stolen and smuggled, but until then, it’s the possession of the resident power structure. But sand “extraction”? Anyone can do that.
Like some undead creature from a B-movie, the festering Political Compass refuses to lie down and die.
I have not changed my views of this daft test one jot. Hand me another sharpened stake.
Champagne is a French drink and so it seems only right that the French have a right to find other uses for their bubbly then drinking or exporting it. There is always a possibility of holding a few bottles ransom to make your employer give in to your demands. Striking is so last year, mon cheri.
Angry workers at a French champagne manufacturer are threatening to dump large loads of champagne in a protest over the uncertain future of their firm, Bricout-Delbeck. Noel Sainzelle, a worker from the CGT trade union was heard yesterday:
We’re fed up and we’re determined. If recent mistakes are not corrected, we will destroy some of the stock.
Way to go. That really is going to help the company that employs you.
Reuters reports that staff at Bricout-Delbeck have seized six million to seven million champagne bottles and 800,000 bottles of the firm’s not yet fully manufactured wine stock, estimated to be worth about 200 million pounds. Several dozen workers at the company in the eastern French champagne producing region have already destroyed 300 litres of not fully manufactured stock.
The champagne apocalypse hangs on a court decision on the firm’s future in November. Bricout-Delbeck was purchased by a U.S. group earlier this year for the symbolic sum of one euro, but was declared bankrupt in April. Market leaders Moet-et-Chandon and Vranken-Pommery then launched a new plan for the firm, offering to take on 95 of the 133 employees and some stock and production facilities. The firm’s previous owners have appealed the plan and a court decision is due on November 13. The delay and uncertainty sparking the protest by staff.
I do not have more detail about the ‘Champagne Affair’. I appreciate the distress of the employees over their future and their right to protest. However, ruining the business of the company that they work for strikes me a bit short-sighted and ultimately self-defeating. But who knows, if they fulfill the threat, the vintage may become extraordinarily expensive due to its rarity. Markets work in mysterious ways…
Fresh British data shows corporate Britain suffered a 10-year record level of bankruptcies in the third quarter of this year, as this article explains. However, before assuming the worst, a good question to always ask when reading stories like this is – how many new business starts were there over the same period? And you know what, after a lot of searching around on Google and elsewhere, it is mighty hard to come up with reliable data. (I would be grateful for help thereon).
But it matters in knowing what the figures are. Because, as the American business writer George Gilder noted more than a decade ago in his excellent book, Wealth and Poverty, if a country has a lot of bankruptcies, it does not necessarily mean an economy is in trouble. So long as bankrutpcies do not outstrip new company formation, there is no problem. In fact, having a lot of bankrupticies is, paradoxically at first sight, a healthy sign. It means folk are taking risks, trying ideas. Some of those gambles will go splat. But even then the sounds of firms hitting the ground with a thud generates knowledge for the rest of the economy. Or to borrow from Karl Popper, bankruptcies are like falsifying a theory in science. You still learn from when an idea is challenged and proven not to work.
So, the latest figures maybe cause for concern. What we really need to know is whether, in Blair’s corporatist and ever more highly-taxed Britain, the animal spirits of entrepreneurs are given full rein.
And I can guess what you good readers out there think of that!
It seems likely that we will soon see a resolution of the government’s prosecution of Martha Stewart. Aside from the leaks from the negotiations regarding a possible plea deal, the most reliable of all possible omens has been sighted: Barbara Walters will conduct one of her patented powder-puff interviews with Martha.
From day one, I have been saying, based on my rusty recollections of securities law, that the feds have no case for insider trading against Martha because she is not an insider. I was delighted to read this article confirming my suspicion that the whole Martha Stewart thing has been an abuse of power by headline hungry New York lawyers and DC regulators.
You have regulators continuing to apply a legal theory on insider trading that has been repeatedly rejected by the courts, and which is ungrounded from any public policy other than class envy. You have prosecutors skipping over a whole raft of more culpable people to target Martha because they know they will get better headlines from attacking her.
It is interesting to note that, even under their rejected and discredited overbroad theory of insider trading, the feds were unable to put together a case against Martha, and are not pursuing insider trading charges.
What, then, is Martha being charged with?
The most serious criminal charge against her is not perjury or insider trading but securities fraud, based on the fact that she denied to the press, personally and through her lawyers, that she had engaged in insider trading. This was done, the feds say, not for the purpose of clearing her name, but only to prop up the stock price of her own publicly traded company, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. In other words, her crime is claiming to be innocent of a crime with which she was never charged.
The whole disgusting saga reads like a textbook example of abuse of power by regulators and prosecutors.
I doubt the BBC particularly wants my off-the-cuff attempt to pee in their iCan pool and I really look forward to goading Johnathan Miller into setting up an anti-TV licence campaign on iCan. However with the Cambridge Women in Black we see an example of exactly the sort of campaign the BBC had in mind when it set up its strange vaguely bloggish monstrosity. They state:
Cambridge Women in Black are holding silent vigils to protest against the ‘war on terror’. We are women of all ages and from all walks of life who oppose the use of violence. We are wearing black to show that we mourn all victims of terrorism and war.
In March 2003 the UK and US governments again attacked the people of Iraq, who have already suffered extensively from war and more than a decade of devastating sanctions. Cambridge Women in Black are here to show that we believe that more violence will not bring security and peace. We call on our government to stop creating yet more misery and hatred.
Note that the woes of the Iraqi people are not due to decades of Ba’athist mass murder and repression but are from the war and sanctions… sanctions during which large palaces and grandiose mosques were constructed in Iraq. Still, I do not suppose I should hold that against the ‘Cambridge Women in Black’ because after all, they state they are mourning “all victims of terrorism and war”… and never said anything about the victims of national socialist tyranny.
story via The Daily Ablution
The Times reports that plans for compulsory national identity cards were put on ice yesterday when the Government delayed a decision on a mandatory scheme until “later this decade”.
Although David Blunkett got the go-ahead for a draft Bill proposing a voluntary scheme in this year’s Queen’s Speech, it will only give the Government powers to build a database using information from passports, driving licences and residents’ permits.
The decision is a blow for both the Home Secretary and Tony Blair. The Prime Minister has invested considerable political capital in the project, saying that Britain has to have compulsory ID cards in the future.
However, after weeks of fierce negotiations, mostly at John Prescott’s Domestic Affairs Committee, the opposition of Cabinet heavyweights led by Jack Straw and Gordon Brown proved too difficult to overcome and a fudge was agreed.
In an unusual step, the Cabinet issued a statement after its weekly meeting yesterday. “In principle Cabinet believes that a national ID card scheme can bring major benefits,” it said. “In practice, given the size and complexity of the scheme a number of issues will need to be resolved over the years ahead.”
The Government would proceed “by incremental steps”. First there would be legislation to set up a scheme, “but we will reserve the final decision on a move to compulsion until later this decade”.
Oh great, so we have some time to spread the word. I would not shut down your iCan campaign against identity cards just yet, Trevor. There is also Big Blunkett’s ‘voluntary’ database that should cover 80 per cent of the population, five to six years after the programme gets under way. Also, Mr Big Blunkett does not want to let go of his scheme and insists that it is phased in, with passports and other official documents acting as a first wave of the programme.
It is far from over yet.
In the Australian state of New South Wales, which includes the city of Sydney, the number of pub licences is finite, and by all reasonable measures too few. Pub licences in Sydney trade like New York taxi plates, and sell for hundreds of thousands of Australian dollars. Because existing licences are so valuable, pub owners are extremely hostile to any competition that would reduce the value of their licences. Therefore, there is very strong resistance to increasing the number of licences and hence the number of pubs. Also, restaurant liquor licences are highly restrictive. Diners may not buy alcoholic drinks in a restaurant unless they “intend to dine”, and they may not drink alcoholic drinks in a restaurant while standing up. If these restrictions were relaxed, there would be little difference between restaurants and bars and pub licences would lose some of their value. The pub lobby therefore opposes any change, and a succession of state governments have given in and have not changed the law.
Of course, if a pub licence costs several hundred thousand dollars, it is necessary for pubs to make a decent return on this investment, and therefore in Sydney there are essentially no small pubs. Pubs are mostly large and fairly soulless. The sort of small, cosy pubs with character that are everywhere in England are mostly absent. And this is a shame.
As it happens, I was today in Canberra, Australia’s capital city. Although the city is entirely surrounded by the state of New South Wales, it has a similar status to Washington D.C. The city sits in a jurisdiction called the Australian Capital Territory (ACT), which is not part of any state but which constitutionally speaking is entirely the responsibility of the federal government. (An ACT government does exist, with powers somewhere in between those of a city government and a state government, but it does so entirely at the pleasure of the federal government).
One thankful consequence of this is that the liquor and pub licensing laws of the state of New South Wales do not apply in Canberra. In Canberra it is not necessary to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for a pub licence, and small pubs are possible. As it happened, I met up with a friend. Knowing my fondness for good beer, the friend took me to a nice cozy little brew pub, that served seven or eight different beers brewed on the premises. There was a hefe-weizenbier (not as good as what I would drink in Germany, but still quite good), a Kölsch style lager, three or four English style cask conditioned ales, and more. It was possible to brew all these beers and sell them on cozy little premises that catered to a clientele that liked that sort of thing. It was nice.
But in Sydney such a thing cannot easily exist. And it is all to protect rent seeking vested interests. Sydney has a huge number of restaurants serving excellent food of every kind imaginable, and is one of the finest cities in the world in which to eat. But as a place to go out for a drink, it leaves something to be desired. Canberra does not have this problem. (To be fair, Melbourne does not have this problem either). And this is entirely due to the difference in regulation.
The ‘fraudster’ meaning, of course, Jacques Chirac. The new president of the European Central Bank is M. Jean-Claude Trichet and buried away at the foot of an old news report is this gem:
Mr Trichet’s nomination was made possible earlier this week when he was cleared of involvement in the Credit Lyonnais banking scandal in the 1990s. He was one of nine men on trial for their part in the affair, which culminated in a €31bn ($33.7bn) bailout by the government.
That is more than £21,000,000,000! For one bank. Nine people. I can just hear them: “Bah! Nick Leeson! “Betsygate” indeed! You English drive your minis with your Benny Hill and your Michael Caine, stealing a few gold bars in Milan and think you’re so marvellous! Hah!”
The Crédit Lyonnais bank ‘affair’ included a massive fraud including loans being made to friends of the late president François Mitterand. At least one of them got a few months in jail to my knowledge. A concerted effort was made to delay the appointment of a new ECB president until M. Trichet’s problems could be dealt with. Ironically, the French verb for to cheat is tricher which is pronounced exactly the same as our new Euro bank president’s name. A very suitable friend for M. Jacques Chirac. The president whose unofficial re-election campaign slogan was Vote for the fraudster, not the fascist! but who has avoided judicial processes by virtue of presidential immunity from prosecution. So much in common for them to talk about.
Now let us assume that M. Trichet were the innocent victim of devious bank subordinates who stole £21,000 million. Personally, I find such a degree of stupidity fantastic: the guy could scarcely have enough brain cells to know how to breathe. Is this really the calibre of executive to put in charge of an EU institution?
A couple of other things worry me. What did the other European leaders think they were doing when none of then vetoed the appointment of Trichet? Perhaps Mr Blair really is a closet hater of the euro – I hope so. And if the currency markets are not dumping euros for US dollars before M. Chirac’s friends get their pillaging underway… what do they know about what the Federal Reserve guys are up to?
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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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