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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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Perry’s comments on George W. Bush’s economically illiterate steel tariffs below are surely a reminder that conservatives (with a large or small c) are often the worst defenders of free enterprise.
How on earth can Dubya, for whom I have a fair amount of respect, talk about free markets any more with a straight face? Looks like the worst kind of vote-grubbing measure to me. Clearly bound to have an adverse impact on other sectors of the economy as well as sour relations with other parts of the world.
Bush has given the euro-weenies a stick to beat him with – and this time they have right on their side. Bush’s move is clearly related to next November’s Congressional elections. George, get a copy of Henry Hazlitt’s “Economics in One Lesson” and wise up!
The recent trip by George Bush to Asia in which he preached the value of free trade and capitalism was of course widely reported in the media across the world. As a result, his remarks about the lowering of trade barriers are inevitably going to be thrown back in his face following the ludicrous imposition of 30% tariffs on steel imported into the USA.
Given that the underlying trend for steel imports into the USA has been downwards for years (down 30% over the last four) it is particularly bizarre that this politically motivated protectionism should have been allowed to happened. Of course this will also result in more expensive steel for the domestic US construction and manufacturing industry, it will cause retaliatory tariffs against US products overseas and most importantly, completely destroys the US ability to put political or moral pressure on other countries to lower tariffs against US goods.
So in order to protect some jobs in an inefficient sector, other US jobs are put at risk in not just steel consuming areas of the economy but also possibly the entire export sector once anti-US retaliatory measures are used to hit back by US trading partners.
Perhaps someone needs to point out to Dubya that compared to the value of liberalisation of the world trading system to a massive high tech external trading nation like the USA, the US steel industry is really not that important in the overall scheme of things. In any case, the whole idea that less competition will make the US steel industry more efficient, well, how does that work? It will just penalize the modern and the more competitive US steel producers in order to protect the less efficient unionised dinosaurs who will go bust in a few years anyway regardless. In the meantime overall competitiveness of US industry suffers versus overseas steel users who have access to steel at the regular non-‘protected’ price. Nice one George.
I have been a long time Japan watcher. From a big distance, you understand. Unconfused by too much detailed knowledge. I’ve never been there. But Japan is a big noise in the world, and if you keep your ears open …
Japan, it seems to me, does things unanimously. It moves unanimously, from one unanimous policy to another. It takes an age to change its mind, but once it does, the impact is, for good or for bad, electrifying.
Consider that late nineteenth century moment when, virtually overnight, they suddenly started wearing western suits and top hats. They went from a nation of Kurosawa extras to a nation of Oddjobs, just like that. And with that sartorial switch went a basic switch of worldview, from isolation to looking outwards, from ignoring the West to competing fiercely with it by copying everything it did that seemed to work. One moment, an American admiral is humiliating them by driving a modern warship into one of their ancient harbours. In a blink, the Japanese have their own warships and are knocking seven bells out of the Russians. Japan does all it can to try to catch up with and overtake America peacefully, but America isn’t having it, or so it seems to them. So kaboom!!! Pearl Harbour. Instant conquest of the Pacific. After humiliation in war and further humiliation in the peace that followed, the Japanese mutate from a people who despise modern consumer comforts to people who make the best consumer goods on earth. One moment Japan is making “notoriously shoddy goods”. A blink of an eye later (kaboom!!!), Scottish electronics companies have to call themselves things like “Hinari” in order to do any business.
But now the elite-guided-crony-capitalist status quo which presided over the creation of the Sony Walkman is running seriously out of steam, seemingly with Japan’s entire elite unanimously powerless to reverse the steady drift towards catastrophe. To solve their Keynesian mess, all they now seem capable of is more Keynesianism.
The Economist of February 16th 2002 (print edition) expressed the kind of pessimism about Japan that is now the orthodoxy. The cover shows a Japanese face with a tear falling from its eye. On the contents page (p. 5) the picture is elaborated upon with the following caption:
Japan is sliding slowly downhill. The sad thing is that the Japanese don’t seem to mind. Or if they do, they certainly aren’t doing anything about it.
In the leader article on page 11, The Economist ruminates on all the things that the Japanese should do, but reckons they won’t do it:
How much easier it is simply to muddle through, slipping downhill more or less gracefully…Japan now looks to be an irrelevance…
Now, I agree that things in Japan will have to get worse before they get better But then, get better they surely will. Japan will be back.
When Britain gets into trouble, or faces a big decision, we have a huge and very public row, like the row we’re now having, still, about the EU, and we go out of our way to embroil foreigners in our rowing. (Look at the way British anti-EU’ers are now using the Internet to badmouth the EU in America.) And we never completely settle the matter. In Britain, when you say “we”, you are always leaving lots of people – who continue stubbornly to say “I” – out of your generalisation. Same in the USA, yes?
In Japan that’s not how they do things. They do not wash their dirty linen in public. When crisis strikes, they don’t all ring The Economist and argue their particular corners against each other. No, the Japanese elite goes into an endless succession of secret huddles where it sits cross-legged on the floor in big circles, drinks about a trillion gallons of tea and has untranslatable conversations about how worrying it all is. Slowly a New Approach emerges. Slowly. Very slowly. It is reflected upon from all angles, it strengths pondered, its drawbacks thought through. It is tweaked. Then the underlings are drawn into the New Approach, in their own tea circles, lead by those who have participated in the higher tea circles. They contribute their own untranslatable murmurings. More tweaking. More tea circles. And then, just when the outside world has completely given up on Japan, that’s right: kaboom!!!
Do you really believe that the Japanese are content to sink slowly into the ranks of the “irrelevant” nations, and then stay there for ever? I say: Just because we can’t see anything happening just now, that doesn’t mean that nothing is happening. I assume that another Japanese kaboom!!! is even now being got ready, very slowly.
Japan will, as always, do whatever its rivals are now doing that seems to be working best. The Japanese are even now roaming the earth, mentally speaking and probably literally too, searching out “best practice”. They’ll then knit together all the bits of best practice that they can find into a new combined national entity so well-crafted as almost to amount to a new invention. That’s what they did with photocopiers, motorbikes, luxury cars, cameras. That’s what they’ll eventually do with Japan itself.
“Best practice” now consists of, among other things, free market economics as “extreme” as can be contrived. This is the economic policy lesson now being absorbed with such bad grace by the European elites. This is what the Japanese are also learning, but unlike the Europeans they are learning it in secret. Once the lesson is learned, they will apply it with extreme thoroughness.
Japan can’t copy the USA exactly, because they’re too different. Too small, too resource poor. And in any case it wouldn’t want to, because the USA isn’t actually all that “extreme”, only relatively so. My guess is they’ll look at Hong Kong in its glory days, and turn Japan into a cluster of Hong Kongs. They will surely deregulate their banking system, and free up their domestic markets. But whatever they do, it will, I believe, be massively good news for free market supporters everywhere.
Imagine the impact on the world of Japan embracing free market economics with its own unique brand of unanimous enthusiasm, and imagine the further impact when that policy is a triumphant success, as it surely will be.
It won’t be completely libertarian, no way. Too much “we” for that. If you are a foreigner and not part of the Japanese “we”, your participation rights may still be limited, even if not so much as now. Our own Admiral Perry won’t be satisfied. But even so …
Well, we’ll see. I wonder if any real Japan experts will find time to comment on this. It would be great if someone like that did give us a reaction. But don’t expect any Japanese to join in.
Christmas 1914. On the Western front, British and German soldiers face each other off across the barbed wire and the frozen, blood-caked mud and stiff, decomposing bodies of dead comrades. This was warfare as Europe had not witnessed it before: grim, static, total, hellish.
For reasons nobody has ever adequately explained, on this Christmas Day, 1914, a truce was felt necessary and soldiers from each side rose from their positions and enemy met enemy between the trenches in No-Man’s Land and played a game of football.
For a few euphoric hours, soldiers became laughing, playing, carousing men and war was forgotten. But peace had not broken out and fences had not been mended. The game over, the officers led their troops back to their respective lines and the carnage went on and on and on.
There was a faint echo of this legend last night at the ‘Big Brother Awards’ hosted by Privacy International and to which I had been invited by fellow blogger Tom Burroughes. I did not know quite what to expect, but I am customarily on hand to lend such support as I can muster in the battle against Big Brother.
However, as I entered the debating chamber in the London School of Economics, my internal geiger-counter screamed off the scale. It was being bombarded with reds. My hackles never let me down and, boy, were they up. The place was wall-to-wall dreadlocks, canvas knapsacks and sandals complimented by a troop of students in ‘Boycott Esso Oil’ T-shirts and George Bush rubber face-masks.
I was being choked by Chomsky, I could feel the Fisk and smell the Sontag. If I stayed one minute longer I would be pickled in Pilger. I broke out in a feverish sweat and panic set in but, before I could leave a Tom-and-Jerry style hole in the LSE wall, I spotted Tom and, then, to my further bug-eyed surprise, fellow arch-capitalist Tim Evans. And not only was he attending but he was actually reading the nominations!! Just what on earth was going on here?
Further staggering revelations followed when I found out that yet another Libertarian, Malcolm Hutty was there and, in fact, it was his company, Internet Vision, which was co-sponsoring the event together with, wait for it, GreenNet.org!! This was Matter vs. Anti-Matter. Why hadn’t the Universe evaporated in a great, cosmic bang?
Before I could splutter further, the ceremony began and we all settled, a little uneasily, into our seats. We could sense their force and they could sense ours. Somehow, though, the Universe remained stable and the evening was conducted amidst an atmosphere that was appreciative and cordial though far from joyous.
My worst fears were allayed when it became clear that the agenda was being steadfastly adhered to. Privacy was the issue and the sole issue and just about every ‘golden boot’ for its grievous infringement went to HM Government and its agencies. Even I could not suppress a loud whoop when a special ‘boot’ went to the Department of Education and Skills for its ghoulish plans to draw up a clandestine national database for every schoolchild in the country.
Undoubtedly the strangest moment in the evening came when the committee announced that it had been unanimous in wishing to bestow its ‘Freedom Fighter’ award on The Daily Telegraph for its ‘Free Country’ campaign. It was like watching Mullah Omar step up to accept a gong from the B’nai Brith. A crackle of electricity went round the room but, despite some isolated heckles, the recipients were warmly applauded.
When the ceremony was over they all drifted away a little dazed and light-headed. They felt like an audience who had just seen a dazzling magic show and they know that the magic isn’t real but just how did he make that tiger disappear? The Bush-baiters, now unmasked, trooped out again a little sheepishly. It was not the anti-globo ruckus that they (or I) had been expecting.
You know for sure you are living in interesting times when the kind of people whose most prized possession is a bust of Lenin gather together with the followers of Adam Smith and all agree that privacy is important and the state is the biggest threat to it. Interesting and also significant because if my otherwise trenchant ideological foes think that privacy is important then it is to be hoped that they have asked themselves why privacy is important. And if they have, could they possibly come to any conclusion other than the ownership of self and the sovereignty of the individual? It takes questions like that to configure the circuit-boards of the mind into just the right order necessary to illuminate a line of flashing bulbs that light the way to freedom.
If that happens than last night’s ceremony was a mini-milestone in the evolution of political ideas.
On the other hand, it may just have been a Christmas truce between the trenches in No-Man’s Land.
I’d have written this article sooner, but I carry the weight of being a day job scientist and engineer, so I had to actually read the damn thing before I dared to stick my neck out. Gotta keep my street cred intact y’know.
My initial impression after reading the paper is positive. Science, along with Nature are among the most prestigious journals, so right off the bat you know it’s to be taken seriously. Secondly, I know of the technique they used (more later) so it’s not quite so out of the blue as the failed Pons/Fleischman technique.
I’m going to remain cautious until the replications start rolling in. I do not expect it will take many days before that occurs as the published experimental technique does not require any terribly specialized equipment(1). I imagine grad students around the world already are madly digging gear out of closets and throwing their own test beds together. They will want their lab among the first to say Aye or Nay. I would not be surprised to hear the first tentative reports within a few days.
I must admit it was a complete surprise. I’ve been in bull sessions about cold fusion over the last decade or so and cavitation has been one of the ideas that came up again and again. I remember standing around in a conference hallway in 1995 in a circle with 3 or 4 others while Dr. Robert Forward talked about it. As the years have rolled on I assumed people had tried the idea and it hadn’t worked.
I’m sure there will be a lot of hype if replications pour in. But here’s my reality check for you. A few excess neutrons coming out of a beaker is a very, very long way from an economical power generating plant. Even if it works, it could be decades or never before it amounts to anything.
I’ll be watching this one very closely.
(1) Well… I admit the neutron source might be a bit dicey to get hold of.
The April issue of Aeroplane reports an XF-90 was found on Frenchman Flat. It was used during the nuclear testing series there in the early 1950’s and apparently was just forgotten. Not that surprising I guess. One wouldn’t expect a lot of hikers wandering about one the most heavily A-bombed spots on Earth.
It has been recovered and is being decontaminated (after 50 years in the desert I suspect that means hosing the dust off it) and will be displayed at the USAF Museum in Dayton, Ohio. I would imagine it needs “a little work” done on it as well.
Here’s a USAF picture of one of the two of them back when they were new. That makes it 50/50 this is the same plane:
Never believe anything until it has been officially denied
– Claud Cockburn (1904-1981)
I’m going to read more deeply, but the allegations in the Evidence Eliminator link posted below leave me thinking extreme paranoia on the part of Evidence Eliminator:
In considering the exceptionally defamatory content, (the article delivers a propaganda payload of 16 lies) and the conduct of WIRED.COM we have to ask readers to consider the question of whether or not WIRED.COM, LYCOS and/or their trademark holders Carnegie Mellon University (who allegedly have CIA connections) were involved in sending the emails as part of a deliberate covert action to defame and discredit Robin Hood Software Ltd. and Evidence Eliminator™.
Firstly let me state that I know CMU SCS (School of Computer Science) as well as anyone. I was a CMU undergraduate and graduate student, a founding employee of Compuguard, CMU’s first hight tech spin off company, worked for years in the Robotics Institute and then in the Music Lab for several more years. Just to establish my credentials, here is my web page at my old home.
Lycos, like most of the new high tech companies in Pittsburgh is a spinoff from CMU. It was one of the very first web indexers, if not the first. It was done by students.
Lycos went commercial and moved off the campus. Since the work was done with university resources, the university took some stock. CMU is quite a good place for entrepreneurs. Perhaps because for many years the President was a business school type (yes, CMU also has a top business school), the university policies both encourage entrepreneurs and make loads of dosh for the Alma Mater.
We (and I still strongly identify myself with CMU SCS) were always very good at getting DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) funding because we were successfully churning out some of the most advanced work in the world, year after year. CMU (and myself) were on the internet before it was the Internet. I would go so far as to say CMU SCS (along with MIT and Stanford) created the whole ethos of the internet, an ethos which has survived a growth from 20 machines in 1973 to hundreds of millions today.
CMU has been a central clearing house for computer security for ages; formally so with the founding of CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team) within the freestanding Software Engineering Institute in the 80’s, around the time of the Morris Internet Worm. CERT tracks software vulnerability reports and patterns of computer breakins. Any SysAdmin who isn’t aware of them doesn’t know his job.
Now as to the allegation. Does CMU SCS have “ties” to NSA? Probably, but only in the sense it has “ties” to any of it’s Industrial Affiliates, or anyone else from whom the researchers can extract money. CMU is a private university and a very businesslike place as far as money is concerned. As far as lifestyle and research, SCS runs almost like a libertarian anarchy but based on our “reasonable person” principle. The place would drive an experienced cat-herder mad.
Next, Lycos has been a freestanding company for some years. That means it has outgrown the university roots. Although I have not been in Pittsburgh in nearly 10 years, I would bet they are in the industrial park on the Monongahela River where the mile long Johns & Laughlin Steel Mill stood when I was a kid. CMU and the City of Pittsburgh and I think the University of Pittsburgh jointly developed it into a high tech industrial park. It’s a couple miles from the campus at any rate.
Now down to the meat of it. If CMU SCS grads ran tests against Evidence Eliminator and found it wanting, I know which party I would believe. In any case, I’ll be contacting the department to get “our” side of the story.
If you are really worried about keeping your machine clean, you had better just discard your Microsoft products altogether, and you had better be prepared to switch to Linux and (at this point in history) to learn a great deal about security and forensics.
If you’re too lazy or too busy to do it yourself, I’m available on the subject for £70/hr and up.
Yours truly and fellow blogger David Carr attended an awards ceremony hosted by Privacy International for its annual Big Brother Awards at the London School of Economics. When we got there my heart sank. Ok, one or two mates from the Libertarian Alliance were in the room, but my worst fears were aroused when I saw a bunch of twerps sporting George W. Bush face masks. Oh God, I thought, we’ve got the usual mix of muddle-headed Blame-America-First lefties, peaceniks and other delusional types.
But, I have to report that the evening turned out better than I, or I am sure Mr Carr, could have expected. As well as handing out these “awards” to such bodies as the Department of Education (UK) for various infringements of privacy, Privacy International also handed out genuinely positive awards to those who have protected or advanced the course of liberty over the past 12 months, including the right-leaning Daily Telegraph.
It was a genuinely wonderful moment as various lefties hissed and cringed as Telegraph reporter Stephen Robinson went up on stage to pick up the award for the paper’s A Free Country campaign. The Telegraph has opposed state ID cards, supported decriminalisation of some drugs, opposed threats to trial by jury, and also opposed the ongoing encroachments on British liberty from Brussels.
I think something very important happened last night. What we saw were a bunch of peaceniks forced to acknowledge, through gritted teeth, that there is such a thing as a non-left libertarian movement that is passionate about freedom, determined to protect it, but also savours capitalism. I think this is a meme that is going to continue infecting the body politic.
Tom.Burroughes@reuters.com
 When the state watches you, dare to stare back
I have no idea if this is a pukka story but it certainly looks interesting. Anyone out there have a take on this?
Whatever you can provide yourself with to secure protection from men is a natural good
– Epicurus
A tip of the kevlar battlebowler to Dave Tepper
According to Wired the media industry has spent massive amounts of money in its’ attempts to buy the government:
Also, in the 2000 election cycle , the entertainment industry handed Democrats a whopping $24.2 million in contributions compared to $13.3 million to Republicans, according to opensecrets.org.
No wonder they were so loath to give Libertarian Presidential Candidate Harry Browne coverage during the 2000 election campaign. They just didn’t want to waste any of their Demopublican investment.
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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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