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]
|
Professor Reynolds weighs in to the ongoing debate in the USA about arming airline pilots
“I trust airline pilots — and for that matter airline passengers — to protect me far more than I do underperformin’ Norman Mineta, or Tom Ridge.”
I am only too well aware of the number of calls for allowing passengers to arm themselves following 9/11. I was one of those voices. However, on second thought and third thought, I’m wondering if it may not be a bit of a ‘Naomi Klein’ (i.e. a ‘No-Brainer’).
Now before anyone starts calling me a ‘gun-grabber’, let me categorically confirm that my unambiguous support for RKBA remains undiminshed but having your sidearm on an aircraft does not, sadly, make you any less of a sitting target. If we agree to armed passengers then surely it must be all passengers or none and if all passengers can carry guns then what is there to stop, say, three or four terrorists carrying their ‘toolbag’ onto the flight as well? The answer is, nothing. This gives us a very thorny problem when it comes to the kind of slime who crash passenger jets into buildings: it is not just that they are murderous, they are suicidal as well. That makes them very difficult, nay impossible, to deter.
The world of heavily armed passengers is a gilt-edged invitation to Islamofascists whose only desire is to kill as many Westerners as possible. Just how breathtakingly easy would it be to arrange for a team of these nuts to board a 747 with all their automatic weapons and, following take-off, at an appointed moment they all get up, take their catches off and let rip?
I realise that the Islamofascists would themselves get cut down by return fire but two points to note: a) they will not mind in the least. Indeed they will expect it and b) just how many sleepy/drunken/canoodling/reading/slow-witted/elderly/very young innocent people will be slaughtered in a surprise attack, trapped in a steel capsule where they have they nowhere to run and nowhere to hide?Also, whilst one or two bullets piercing a fuselage may not cause the plane to crash, we’re talking about a serious fire-fight here and surely that could.
Some may suggest that strict racial profiling would plug this gap but I rather fear not. Even supposing the killers match the profile (which they may not) many Egyptians, Saudis, Iraqis could easily pass for Greek, Portuguese, Spanish, Brazilian or Italian (with fake passport to match).
No, I regret to say that the idea of arming passengers would work as a very effective deterrent to your average dorky white European terrorist who is happy to see other people die for the ’cause’ but is rather more precious about his own worthless hide. Nihilistic Islamofascists with a death wish are a different order of animal who might gleefully see a measure like this as a golden opportunity to unleash carnage at 30,000 feet.
Hit a man too hard and you can only rob him once; hit him just hard enough and you can rob him every week.
–Thieves’ Guild in Ankh-Morpork (from Terry Prattchet’s Discworld series)
I was having dinner last night in a Polish restaurant with an old chum of mine and a most delectable young lady, when I noticed something that reaffirmed my conviction that the triumph of global capitalism is completely unstoppable. If there was ever any doubt in your mind about how capitalist innovation makes our lives so much better, it can be dispelled by purchasing a bottle of Polish Zywiec beer and examining the label on the back of the bottle closely.
Refrigerate, wait until Zywiec logo appears. That indicates ideal drinking temperature
Science and business join hands to deliver the perfect bottle of beer! God bless capitalism!
Patrick Hayden over on Electolite makes ‘A brief detour into wild generalizations’ when talking about the supposed ‘cultural cringe’ that characterises part of the transatlantic relationship:
But it is hard to imagine anything in recent American history to compare with (for instance) Margaret Thatcher’s comprehensive destruction of autonomous local government bodies or the widespread European surrender of regulatory power to unelected transnational officials.
That is an interesting perspective but looking the other way across the Atlantic I see the RICO statutes wiping out at a stroke two of the supposedly sacrosanct amendments of the Bill of Rights, not to mention the lives of thousands of people each year that they are used against.
Whilst I certainly abominate the transfer of powers of criminal appropriation and force to EU bodies (because they are force backed appropriators, not because they are undemocratic), I also see Margaret Thatcher’s hatchet job on local authorities in Britain as a good thing which just did not go far enough. I saw local bodies engaged in democratically sanctioned theft of wealth, taking money by force from one section of the community and giving it to another more numerous section, being restrained in the extent they could continue to do so by the central government (via rate capping, or abolition in the case of the GLC). I used to work in UK local authority finance and I for one was delighted to see them reined in. Theft is still theft regardless of which tier of government is engaged in it, but obviously less theft is better than more.
I have been mentioned, nay singled out, in despatches over at Warbloggerwatch
In case you are wondering precisely what the measured and temperate Justin Raimondo is responding to, it is this
I am particularly fond of this zappy piece of analysis:
“And what a statist mentality it is — influenced, perhaps, by a bit of the typical British “cane-the-wogs” and long-live-the-Empire arrogance.
Anyway, must dash. I have to go and teach the damned fuzzy-wuzzys a thing or two.
I liked Francis Moore’s short sting-in-the-tail posting over at the Liberty Log yesterday. 1), 2) and 3) are familiar enough this-versus-that contrasts (Korea, China, Germany), although deserving of infinite repetition. 4) (Britain) contains the provocative duo. Clue: they do the Liberty Log in Scotland.
Freedom and Whisky is also a Scottish inclined blog. There were two more good postings by F&W boss David Farrer yesterday, about Adam Smith and about the PC menace to Ryanair.
Have all these Scotbloggers been introduced? Presumably. If not, this should connect them.
Police in Manchester will be patrolling the streets armed with machine-guns in response to a massive upsurge in gun-related crime
“Recently, the level of firearms incidents particularly in areas of south Manchester has reached an intolerable level,”
You see, gun control really does work!
Is it just me or has anyone else noticed that the spate of anti-semitic attacks sweeping across France (and elsewhere in Europe but especially France) seem to have, well, stopped?
It occured to me tonight that, not only have they stopped, but they seem to have dried up at the very same time as Monsieur Le Pen came waddling belligerently onto the world stage.
Of course, maybe they are still occuring. Maybe there are Synagogues burning in Marseilles as I type but I can’t help thinking that, if that were the case, at least one of the Blogosphere’s ‘sniffers’ would have picked it up and run with it. So maybe they really have stopped, despite the fact that Israeli operations on the West Bank have not.
Coincidence? Who can say? Certainly not me. Interesting though.
Romano Prodi may be a hackneyed old Eurocrat but he is definitely onto something when he says that the British are afraid of full engagement in the EU.
According to The Great Protuberant One, Britain is:
“…constantly on the defensive, putting the brakes on, dragging its feet on vital issues, fighting a rearguard action that can hold up, but cannot stem, the tide of history.”
Sadly, that’s not how it looks from where I sit. And would that we could ‘stem’ this particular ‘tide of history’. Unfortunately, we can’t. The only thing we can do is save our nation and watch from the sidelines as this ‘tide of history’ drowns all those it engulfs.
Nonetheless, credit where it is due. Prodi is on an honesty roll as he notes:
“I wonder what makes this great nation happy to be a junior partner in a transatlantic relationship, but afraid to take its rightful place alongside its European allies?”
Allow me to clue you in, Prodi: it’s because the Channel is wider than the Atlantic. Across the Channel are friends, across the Atlantic is family.
Do you live in the EU? In Britain? Well you have been nationalised… super-nationalised in fact. Yes, I mean you. You do not own your own labour, it is no longer yours to give or not give, as you see fit.
Do you need a bit more money to take your family on holiday later in the year? Want a bit of a boost to buy a slightly bigger car this time? Well if you ask your boss for some overtime to pad out the ol’ pay packet, the European Union has a message for you: tough shit. They know what is best for you and you do not… and they want the British state to use force against both you and your employer if you will insist on contributing to economic growth for longer than 48 hours in a week.
Do NOT cooperate. If you need the money, conspire with your boss and become economic ‘criminals’, it is an entirely honourable thing to do.
The free market is not a panacea. It does not eliminate old age, and it won’t guarantee you a date for Saturday night. Private enterprise is fully capable of awful screw-ups. But both theory and practice indicate that its screw-ups are less pervasive and more easily corrected than those of government enterprises, including regulatory ones.
– Paul Krugman (who actually is capable of making sense occasionally)
The classical end of the music recording business has been enduring a slow crisis caused by the fact that the classical repertoire is (a) stagnant and (b) now all recorded. Classical freaks like me now have all we need. We have multiple versions of everything good, and although the newly composed stuff is occasionally worth hearing, most of it is a load of old Boulez. The only serious unfinished task is the recording of the entire operatic repertoire on DVD instead of just on CD.
The usual answer to the plight of high culture is that low culture should subsidise it, but these are also bad times for the economically serious end of the recorded music business. The free internet downloading of pop music is playing havoc with record company profits.
Which means that classical music, just when it is least able to, must now pay its own way. Big classical names are now having their hitherto automatically renewed contracts terminated by the dozen. And as these former titans slide into penury, their cultural centrality disappears. Big star classical performers in 1960 were really something, because the very first stereo recording of a major item of the repertoire was a big event. No matter how good it may be, a recording now (the thirtieth) of the same piece cannot possibly matter so much. Herbert von Karajan was a more central figure in European culture than Karajan’s newly appointed successor at the helm of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, Sir Simon Rattle, can ever be, no matter how much “better” the critics may tell us Rattle is.
The politicians are not helping nearly as much as the likes of Rattle think they should. Suddenly the cabinets of the western world consist not of old-time culture-lovers but of ageing Beatles fans. They still dole out arts subsidies but they are cutting back on supporting “elitists”. Instead they are “democratising” arts spending. Instead of giving huge gobs of money to high-culture high-talent parasites, they now prefer to give lots of little gobs of money to lots of no-hoper parasites. Such trends take time to work their way through (hence the continuing significance of who gets to boss the BPO), but you can feel the oil tanker turning, slowly but surely.
Classical music itself will last for ever. This is the great historic achievement of the classical music recording business. But historic achievements don’t pay wages now. What is to be done?
One answer is to cut prices and to cut costs. Wrench the price of new classical CDs (not just of regurgitated old recordings) from the best part of twenty quid down to a fiver, slash the fees paid to the performers and generally cut out the crap. This is what Naxos has done, with great success.
There’s much talk of new “business models” for the recording and “delivery” of classical music, with the copyright and long-term royalty streams remaining with the artists but with any first time round income going to the recording companies. In other words the recording companies no longer place bets on artists. The artists place their own bets, and the recording companies are now bookies. To me this sounds like a thinly disguised pay cut. Or, even more cruelly: vanity recording. (Bloggers won’t need to have this trend explained to them.)
So, when all else fails, go with babe appeal. I give you Hilary Hahn. Now I do not yet get all the subtleties of Samizdata‘s editorial policy, but when it comes to babe photography it is my clear understanding that we are all for it. So here are some Hahn likenesses, taken from her website.
Hilary Hahn is not just a pretty face. She can definitely play. Her recording of three of the six Bach unaccompanied violin pieces is one of my all time favourite CDs, and all her four recordings so far are decently done. But from a business point of view it is clear what is happening here. In the sleevenotes accompanying her latest recording, of the Brahms and Stravinsky violin concertos, released just before Christmas, I counted no less than fifty six photographs of her, together with three of her conductor Sir Neville Marriner, and three of the two of them together. Total number of photos of Johannes Brahms: zero. Total number of photos of Igor Stravinsky: zero.
This is not a long-term answer, either for the classical music recording business in general or for the likes of Hilary Hahn in particular. (That Brahms/Stravinsky disc is already being heavily discounted in London’s HMV stores.) But while it lasts it’s fun to look at.
|
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.
|
Recent Comments