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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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At just after 11 pm London time, in about half an hour or so as I begin to compose this posting, NFL Super Bowl XXXVII will blast off, in San Diego, Southern California – and I will be watching it on British Channel 5 TV. In the last few years, Channel 5 have shown lots of American football, but not the Super Bowl itself. Sky TV would nip in and buy the Super Bowl, leaving Channel 5 with a stupid little highlights show the day after, and I eventually stopped bothering about any American football. But this year, probably because Sky has finally devoured all its adversaries in the shark tank that is British pay TV and doesn’t need to spend money on such things any more, regular Channel 5 is showing the Super Bowl as well as having shown lots of the preceding games. They of course flagged this up loudly beforehand, which means that this time around I’ve been paying attention to the entire NFL season.
Something similar has happened with rugby. All of the Six Nations games this year are about to be shown by the BBC. For the last few years regular TV only showed highlights of the England home games at Twickenham, but now I’ll be able to see all the England games in their entirety. Deep joy.
I don’t much care who wins the Super Bowl. I’ll be watching for the Americanness of it all, for Shania Twain at half time (although ST’s recent album is a huge disappointment to my ear), for the astonishing skill of one guy chucking a ball forty yards, and another guy running full tilt and catching it without breaking his stride, which means that the ball must have been thrown exactly right, several seconds earlier, at a completely blank piece of pre-selected grass. Being a successful NFL quarterback must be about as easy as being a First World War fighter ace. Amazing. And I’ll be watching because I like it when the people I hated at school inflict pain on each other instead of on me. The crowds that watch these games are exuberant, but not psychotic. The commentary is expert, but good humoured. The game itself combines immense intellectual complexity with raw human muscle power. The dancing girls on the touchline are great, as is the aerial photography of the stadium and its surrounding localities. Channel 5 TV reception in my home is very bad, but I don’t care.
I do, however, have my criticisms of American football, most of them centred on what is called “parity”, and when rootling around for a website link to include here I discovered that my doubts are shared by some Americans. → Continue reading: Super Bowl Sunday – parity in the USA and life in England
Salam Pax, as always, full of juicy goodness interspersed with a sobering discourse. Just go and raed.
The best known free market economist in Britain after World War II was not F.A. Hayek (who taught mainly in the United States and then Germany), but rather John Jewkes of Oxford.
John Jewkes was the main voice opposing government economic ‘planning’ and the endless taxes, spending programs and regulations of modern Britian.
Jewkes opposed statism in many ways – he tried to show students and fellow academics some of the errors of statist policy in his university work, he sat on official commissions (and tried to make their reports less insane), and he wrote a series of articles and books for the layman. Such books as Ordeal by Planning and The Sources of Invention.
John Jewkes was, in many ways, the best British economics had to offer in the post war world – and he shows that British economics was dying as a serious discipline. How can I say this? Well consider the following.
“It would be idle to deny that the White Paper was a ‘Keynesian’ document. Keynes was, after all, the major prophet of the idea that governments could, by increasing aggregate demand, reduce unemployment. Some of those who collaborated in the preparation of White Paper had been his pupils or had long been his followers. Those who resisted some of his ideas before the war had later gained an enormours respect for and confidence in him as they watched, and collaborated in, his superbly dextrous negotiations with the American Government and its economic officials. Those who had perhaps been most suspicious of the pre-war ideas of Keynes (I was among these) had seen at first hand the horrible consequences of the pre-war high rates of unemployment in the depressed areas, especially among juveniles and were only too ready to concede that, if the doctrine of the White Paper could be made to work, the post-war world might be a safer and more humane place”.
The Government and Economic Policy: A Defence of the White Paper on Employment Policy 1944, page 42.
Essay Three of John Jewkes’ A Return to Free Market Economics (Macmillan Press 1978).
My first concern here is not with the the idea that ‘increasing aggregate demand” (government issuing more funny money) is a good idea (absurd though that is), but the total lack of interest in basic economic theory that John Jewkes shows. → Continue reading: The death of economics in Britain
It must have been about a year ago when a gentleman describing himself as a ‘real socialist’ fetched up on the Libertarian Alliance Forum and threw himself headlong into stinging denunciations of the state and its coercive methods. He was delighted to be amongst those of what he believed to be a like mind. But he wasn’t just against government coercion, no. He was against all coercion which included the ‘tyranny’ of capitalism, commerce, money and property (which he regarded as theft).
Upon further prompting (and it didn’t take much) he advised that his goal was a pure society where all government, money, trade, property and personal gain had been abolished. Intrigued (and heartily amused by this stage) we asked him how he intended to prevent people from creating currencies, establishing property rights and trading as they please without coercion.
In response he was both affronted and bemused. Why couldn’t we understand that when all the above-mentioned iniquities had been abolished, a spontaneous order of cooperation would arise, self-interest would be dispensed with, and there will be no need for coercion because nobody will want things like property and money.
After the delivery of a few well aimed logic incendiaries, he disappeared taking his one-man crusade for utopia with him. He simply could not understand why people would want money or property in a world where everything was free. I daresay that he still has the hoots of our derisive laughter ringing in his head.
I am reminded of this gentleman and his utopian vision because of something posted by one of our commentators recently:
“As I’ve mentioned before, the US Libertarian Party has a concept called the non-aggression principle which states that you will not initiate force, or advocate its initiation. Anyone who joins the LP signs a statement saying that they will abide by that.”
On the face of it, the non-aggression principle (NAP) sounds like a very noble and enlightened thing. Indeed, it is a principle to which I once subscribed myself. However, further reflection (and not just recent events or by way of any reference to the possible impending assault on Iraq) has led me to quite a different opinion. → Continue reading: The best form of defence
I want to know what happened to ‘going overland to India’ to seek spiritual fulfilment and alternative lifestyles? Perhaps the Indians have decided to put a stop to all that. Can’t say as I blame them.
However, that means that the Anti-Everything Brigade has been unleashed in droves all over the rest of the planet like deranged locusts. The Swarm du jour has now descended upon Porto Alegre in Brazil where this hotch-potch of losers, whiners, nutjobs and assorted marxoids, and which now dubs itself the (snigger) ‘World Social Forum’ is in a gigantic snit about not being taken seriously.
Mercifully, they are not taken seriously. Except by the BBC (sorry, the ‘World Media Forum’) which has published a glowing full-page tribute:
“As soon as you arrive your senses are overloaded with colourful causes and campaigns all competing for attention.”
Especially your sense of smell.
“It does not aim to promote one view but celebrate diversity.”
Great can we come along to sing the praises of capitalism, then?
“If the businessmen and political heavyweights from Davos were transported to Porto Alegre – slogan “another world is possible” – they really would believe they were on a different planet.”
Yup.
“Where else would a gay rights march be followed moments afterwards by a pro-Palestinian protest?”
Not in Palestine that’s for sure.
“Or landless people’s movements from Latin American, Asia and Africa be able to sit round a table and compare notes?”
Landless but not flightless apparently. Exactly where do these starving peons get their travel money? And precisely what ‘notes’ do they compare?
“Hey, Miguel, do you have any land”?
“No”
“Neither do I. Okay, meeting adjourned.”
“Of course, conflict and disagreement are inevitable but that is half the fun.”
What’s the other half of the fun?
“On the first day of the Forum the people took to the streets for an anti-war march.
As Brazilian government ministers walked with protesters there was an air of great hope spreading to campaigners from all across the globe.”
Another feature of the reporting of all these events is this kind of semi-messianic euphoria. They’re forever telling the world how excited and happy they are. Is it jet-lag, I wonder?
Others may be interested in my evening reading: Apparatus of Lies, a recently published White House document.
It’s the first time I’ve read a full story on the bomb shelter filled with civilians we hit in Iraq during the last war. It turns out there was a lot more to this than met the News camera’s eye.
I’ve been meaning to write a little about Bigelow Aerospace since before Christmas but just never could get around to it. There always seemed to be some Earth shattering events of war or liberty lost to soak up my limited writing time.
I’ll state right up front that I am not a disinterested party. The space community is incestuous beyond belief and everyone knows everyone else or a friend of theirs… or something. You would be hard pressed to find two people with more than one degree of separation. And so it is with myself. I’ve known the VP of Bigelow for over a decade, since back when in his own words “he drowned astronauts for a living”. Greg Bennett was one of the EVA planners at NASA Houston Manned Space Flight Center back then, and involved with dunking suited astronauts in the big tank they used for mission training. He was the founder of the Artemis Project of which I also became a part. And when I started my own company, the commercial side of the project got a sliver of ownership and Greg a board seat in it.
So I’ve bared all. Now for the interesting parts. Bigelow intends to kick start space tourism. He’s put $500M of his own money on the line, and there is little risk he won’t carry through because his low profile fortune was earned from Budget Suites of America, a company wholly owned by he and his wife. Decision making is rapid and final. He can plan in terms of decades.
Space was his dream from when he began his business career some thirty years ago. He is now in a position to actually do something. Unfortunately for those on the outside, this total control means he doesn’t have to publish information. He is playing this venture quite close to the chest because he can. I know most of the people named in one of the links below and I know of their travails. I do not blame him for doing his work behind guarded doors.
I do not know “Mr Big” and I am not one to pump old friends in high places (ie Greg) for proprietary information. All I can say is, Bigelow Aerospace are up to some interesting things in their desert version of the “Fearing Island” compound. You will want to read this and this to learn just about everything there is about the venture in the public domain.
I have liked many of Mark Steyn’s articles in recent months but in The Falklands War is a model of fierce good sense, he has outdone himself. he draws many useful parallels between the Falklands War and the impending war with Iraq’s Ba’athist regime.
Why would anybody think, faced with economic catastrophe, that invading a string of distant islands is the answer? Dictators don’t behave rationally. Indeed, one reason they become dictators is precisely to escape the tiresome constraints of rationality. There may be valid arguments for not going to war with Iraq, but not the ones that begin, oh, even if Saddam has weapons of mass destruction, he’d never use them against the West. Never bet on a dictator’s rationality.
This is Steyn at his best… read the whole article!
What’s the last thing you need while desperately trying to survive as your country is mercilessly bombed by a state-of-the-art US Air Force? How about a bunch of Western pacifists who can’t speak Arabic and don’t know their Dinars from their elbows standing around getting in the way?
The ‘human shield’ left for Iraq yesterday. In three Routemaster buses (the kind they stopped making around 1946, you see them in all the old movies). So at least we can assume it will take them several months to get there, which will be a relief to Baghdad because, as Adriana Cronin noted a few weeks ago, Baghdad residents like the always-interesting Salam Pax don’t actually want a ‘shield’ of pointless woolly Westerners making a burden of themselves. They would actually rather have proper help, like food and first aid on the border crossings, if anyone happens to feel like a bit of charity Gulf war work.
But this pack of doves’ real enemy is not American bombers or Western politicians: it’s you and me, the public. Although insistent that, “Nobody really wants this war except those who stand to gain from this by selling guns,” (well of course, there’s a stash of rifles ready and waiting up in my airing-cupboard right now) they are actually attempting to hold ordinary Western members of the public to ransom. Former US marine Ken Nichols-O’Keefe, founder of “The Truth Justice Peace Human Shield Action Group” is going on hunger strike, not until the war is stopped, but until more people join his cause.
Ten thousand supporters is the exact price he stuck on his own head.
“If we don’t get 10,000 people, I think this is a world that will be hard to live in for all of us” said Ken.
Well, at least he won’t be living in it; that should help a little bit.
“This conflict will lead to World War Three,”
…he went on, presumably in a burst of wishful thinking…
“We need to stop this war first and foremost, if we don’t, shame on us all and pity on us all.”
Shame and pity it is, then.
So, comrades, get yourselves out there with the Shield of Confusion, or the war vet snuffs it. What a choice. As shieldster Ube Evans said:
“Somebody’s got to save humanity from themselves. I’m very scared.”
Baghdad: be very afraid. These people are trying to help you.
Although, as the hunger strike isn’t scheduled until Ken arrives in Iraq, and as it will take them all so long to get there in the double-deckers, my guess is that T.T.J.P.H.S.A.G.’s (say it loudly with enthusiasm and people will think you’re speaking Arabic) real secret plan is to trundle up some time around Christmas when the war is over, have a little holiday, buy a few carpets, and fly back home again. Let’s hope so, for the Iraqi people’s sake.
Whether one thinks government is a necessary thing (if only for fighting other, worse, governments) or not, it is well to remember that one should not place great trust in government.
A recent reminder of this in the British context:
A few years ago the mobile telephone (cell phone) companies paid the British government many billions of pounds for licences.
It is now widely agreed that the companies that got the licences went a bit mad during the auction process and grossly overpaid – but at least they thought they had an asset (even if it was an asset they had paid too much money for).
They were quite wrong. They forgot about the government’s power to regulate (although the very institution of a ‘licence’ should have reminded them of this power).
Now the government regulators have demanded that the mobile telephone companies cut the price of telephone calls.
In short the mobile telephone companies paid many billions of pounds for nothing. The powers that be can come along and regulate their profits away.
The “close working relationship” they had with the government was a sham, their trust in Mr Blair and Mr Brown with their “support for British high tech business” (like the late Harold Wilson’s “white heat of technology” back in the 1960’s) was quite mistaken.
Now the companies are screaming and going to court – but I bet they wish they had not got involved with the government in the first place.
If money does not matter to you, you do not have much imagination
– Tania Emery
We have lately been hearing the question “Why Iraq when we know North Korea has the bomb?” The official answers we have been given so far have not been truly satisfactory. I will posit this is due to an (perhaps justified) unwillingness on the part of US officials to state the threat equation in its’ purest Machiavellian form.
North Korea is no where near the threat Iraq is. Even with nuclear weapons they are not in the same league. This may seem strange to the reader. They have nukes, they have missiles, they have half a million artillery pieces facing across the border, they have troops enough to flood across the border like a mile wide horde of cockroaches against a single can of Raid.
That is true. Next question. After they take over South Korea, what next? They are on a peninsula. Their neighbors are China, Russia and Japan. Japan is far across the water. So in the worst case, what do we lose? South Korea. That’s it.
What happens after they finish the rape, pillage and burn? After they’ve wrecked the South Korean infrastructure in pitched battles against the large and well equiped South Korean military? Is a nation that can’t feed itself going to rebuild the South Korean economy when it couldn’t build it’s own in the first place? What are they going to do with a large enemy population which has just been brutally awakened to the fact they can’t go out and shop in the trendy stores any more? That there is going to be no choice in the next election? That their future is the image of a boot heel stamping on their faces, forever?
Is North Korean going to go North and take on the Chinese Peoples Army? Are they going to build massive numbers of ships and attempt to cross the straits into the the teeth of a “Made in America” Divine Wind?? Will the three Korean soldiers who survive to wash up on the northern shores of Japan proceed to conquer it?
Not bloody likely.
You say, but they have nukes! They have missiles. This is true. But the missiles cannot yet reach the caribou herds in Alaska, and it is unlikely North Korea would retain the infrastructure for building them immediately following a very difficult victory. The entire Korean peninsula would be in ashes. By the time they rebuild with the help of fresh slave labour battalions from the South, America will have shipboard missile defense systems just outside their territorial waters ready to stop short range missiles aimed at Japan – and permanent facilities in the Aleutians to defend North America.
North Korea would find itself in a situation similar to where it started, only worse. It would take decades to fully digest the liberal South Korean society and bury the bones of it.
This is a “best case scenario” for North Korea. It is also highly unlikely and that is as apparent to the North Koreans as it is to me. A more likely result of such a miscalculation is a replay of the first Korean War… but without hordes of Chinese troops and experienced WWII Russian pilots storming across the Yalu to push back the American counter offensive.
Now compare the situation to Iraq. It is a large and strategically located asian nation. It is surrounded by far weaker neighbors. Only Iran seems capable of standing up to them. So he’d leave them for desert.
Look at a map with the jaundiced eye of an experienced Risk player. Jordan and Kuwait are obvious snacks. The Saudi’s are a pushover. The Emirates are nice people but are very small; Yemen wouldn’t last very long either. If left to his own Xerxian dreams, Saddam would very quickly reinstate most of the ancient Assyrian empire. He’d own the middle East from the Turkish border to the Indian Ocean.
Then he’d take on the nuclear powers. He’s got enough people and desert to take whatever Israel or Pakistan could mete out. He might leave Iran for Oday’s generation. Future conquests require going through Egypt, and once that is managed what is going to stop him in Northern Africa?
All the while, he’s got an economy far more effective than North Korea. There are shopping malls and consumer goods in Baghdad that would dazzle the eyes of a North Korean. He’s an old style conqueror, not an ideologue. He doesn’t have to control everything. He’ll use terror and random killings to keep the population sufficiently cowed, but beyond that they may work and create wealth.
This is why Iraq must be dealt with and North Korea may be left to moulder.
Note: Thanks to Mark G for pointing out a blooper on my part. I’ve corrected ‘Abyssinian’ to ‘Assyrian’.
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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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