As of this Thursday, Samizdata will temporarily stop updating and on Friday, it will go off-line completely for… a while.
We wil be back at some point over the weekend with the New Improved Version.
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Roosevelt’s claim that we can judge the social conscience of the government by how it collects taxes is true in a way he could not have imagined. Contrary to FDR and Justice Holmes, taxes are neither a price (in the voluntary-transaction sense) nor club dues. On the contrary, they are exactions by threat of violence. Some social conscience! How ironic that organized society and civilization itself are said to depend on the government’s threatening peaceful people if they fail to surrender their property as demanded by politicians who presumptuously and self-servingly claim to “represent” all the people. Far from some enlightened institution, taxation began when conquerors realized that formal and continuing appropriation of a subject population’s wealth was preferable to hit-and-run pillaging. For this to work, however, the rulers needed to convince the peasants that the regime would protect them from predators in return for their regular remittances. That’s right: It was a protection racket, from which the racketeers and their cronies profited handsomely. December 11th, 2012 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
That is just one paragraph from a guide to filling in a form related to my pension. I do not want this stuff filling up the hard disk in my head. I want to free up space for important things like the plot of the Lord of the Rings fan fiction I am reading or the details of Climategate or even some mathematics or the rules to Magic: The Gathering. But no, the great game of Nomic that officialdom plays goes on, and the boring stuff requires ever more attention. December 10th, 2012 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
Burton Roll Out ‘Arthur Scargill Clothing Line’ Inspired By Trade Unionist Leader. Seen via what I intially thought was a first-class joke article in the Guardian. But the only joke in the piece is Aditya Chakrabortty’s gullibility regarding TUC “research”, for, verily, Burton menswear really is offering the discerning customer a ‘vintage-inspired fashion-aware range’, designed by Liam Hodges
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The next step for the brand simply must be haircare. December 10th, 2012 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
Incoming from Alex Singleton:
Singleton’s review is entitled “Manufacturing Consent by Chomsky and Herman isn’t just wrong: it is ludicrous”. Chomsky argues that multinational corporations have it all their own way in the mainstream media. Singleton argues otherwise:
Indeed. Having worked in the media himself, Alex Singleton now earns his living advising organisations, big and small, about how to handle the media. So, if you run a wealthy organisation, and you are facing some sort of crisis and consequently are liable to get a media beating, why not give Singleton a call? Maybe he could manufacture some consent for you. December 10th, 2012 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
Is insomnia the big disease of the twenty first century? Famously, markets are now open for business twenty four hours a day, and have been for several decade. Someone somewhere always to buy or to sell, and has the electronic trickery to do it. Goddaughter 2: One of her teenage bizarrenesses was doing social media – gossipping as we used to call it – until 5am, while still starting school on time. The word is she’s over this now, thank goodness. But, it wasn’t just her. She was gossipping with fellow teenage insomniacs. Me: My sleep during the winters is now deranged by cricket matches all over the world, most of it played in my night time. (I have recently learned how to watch such cricket, at no monetary cost, on my computer. I’d rather not say how.) Last night, I woke up at 3.30am, to watch England beat India in Kolkata. I also got to bed last night, again, at 5am. Everyone: Just able to live, virtually, all around the clock. And it’s a positive feedback loop, a network effect. The more people are doing things all around the clock, the more excitements there are everywhere, all around the clock, and the more sleep patterns everywhere are deranged. In former centuries, without the ability to communicate cheaply and interestingly with places where it was broad daylight, there was, at night, a lot less to do. Other than the obvious. The obvious has always caused insomnia, for those who can’t get enough of it. Now all the fun you can have with your clothes on (or not, it doesn’t matter) has joined the obvious. As culture (including politics) goes ever more global, there are ever more inducements to keep paying attention to your particular thing, as the small hours get bigger. The other big techno-trend I think I see now is computerised mobility. For my generation, the two big technological dramas were the arrival of television and the arrival of computers and the internet. But perhaps historians will see those two dramas as just the one. People stopped going out, and instead stayed at home, staring at electronic screens and listening to electronic boxes. The first upheaval did indeed culminate in television, having been preceded by radio and gramophones, because all of that stuff kept people at home, as did the early internet. The second upheaval was all these toys becoming mobile. Looking at things this way, the Sony Walkman becomes more significant than the first personal computers. The first computers made the telly a bit more intelligent and a bit more fun, but you still stayed at home and got fat and lazy. The Walkman got people up off their fat arses and out and about again. And now the iThings and their non-Apple progeny are making the Get Out More life even more attractive, to the point where you can do all your work on the move. Mobile technology is all still a bit clunky, I think. All those wires and headphones and little thingies to put in your pocket somewhere. Which is why I think the development of computerised glasses – or spectacles (merging the two meanings of that word into one again) – may prove to be so significant. And in the age of total surveillance and universal face recognition, great big non-see-through glasses are going to become very popular, even if they merely look like head-held TVs. (Clever spectacles will of course make photographing other people, literally in a blink, even easier and even harder to spot.) I have the feeling that somehow or another techno-induced insomnia and techno-mobility are pretty closely connected. One rather obvious connection is that people who take exercise sleep better. But there are surely many other connections. Here’s one. There is a class of semi-mobile technology which I find invaluable for getting to sleep. A problem for insomniacs is that whereas they (we) can doze off in front of the telly with ease, once in bed, the combination of the effort involved in actually getting to bed, and then the silence, can be hideously arousing. Silence now being an oddity, it keeps many of us awake. (This may be why I write better when no music is playing.) Two tricks I have learned for getting to sleep are (a) watching dvds on my little portable telly, and then (b) playing music very quietly beside the bed. I soon get drousy, and the slight effort involved in putting aside the telly and swtching on the music, or just switching the telly over to music, is not enough to seriously wake me up. So anyway (I have only recently noticed that “anyway” means “I am about to disconnect from you, for no obvious reason other than that I just am”), blah blah blah. Discuss. Or, I have bored you so completely that you will now go to sleep. December 9th, 2012 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
“And when the Brits initially kept their distance, Led Zeppelin grabbed America from the opening chord.” – Barack Obama. So, is it true that the people responsible for launching the careers of The Beatles, The Who, The Kinks, The Small Faces, Pink Floyd and Jimi Hendrix kept their distance from Led Zeppelin? The only test I can think of is to see how well their records performed in the charts. In this, Wikipedia is your friend. And it shows that all of Led Zeppelin’s studio albums did at least as well in the UK as in the US and that Led Zep I (the one with that opening chord) did better. December 9th, 2012 | 35 comments - (Comments are closed)
The tale of Climategate and its aftermath is not an edifying one. As we look back over the ten years of this story, the impression we get is a wave of dishonesty, a public sector that will spin and lie, and mislead and lie, and distort and lie, and lie again. If one lie fails then another lie is issued and if that fails then they simply lie again. – Andrew Montford, Hiding the Decline: A History of the Climategate Affair, p307. Having chronicled in painstaking detail official attempts to save face and hide the truth, Bishop Hill (as he is otherwise known) finally loses his temper. December 8th, 2012 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
Last night, before going to sleep, I switched on the radio commentary for the India England cricket match now in progress in Kolkata, so that, in the event that I did the opposite of dozing off (dozing on?) I would keep up with England’s currrently very satisfactory progress in that game. With luck, tonight and tomorrow night, England will bowl out India cheaply in their second innings and England will go 2-1 up in the four game series. Find out if that happens by looking, e.g., here. So far so sporty. But this morning, waking up at tea time, so to speak, I found myself listening, not to England’s batsmen batting and India’s bowlers bowling, but to this broadcast (that link switches it on straight away which you might not like – maybe going here would be more convenient – details down a bit on the left) done by the BBC’s long-time cricket commentator Jonathan Agnew. This broadcast was about a charitable enterprise in Kolkata which rescues street children, gives them somewhere unscary and unprecarious and unchanging to live, and which then educates them. This broadcast lasts a mere fifteen minutes, otherwise it would have gone on longer than the tea interval. The enterprise it reports on is called Future Hope. Learning about Future Hope is the sort of process that causes people with opinions about how the world should be organised to say: “and this just goes to show how right I have always been about …”. To me, what comes through is how morally uncorrupted these children were when first rescued, it having been precisely their moral excellence that got the attention of the man, a chap called Tim Grandage, who started Future Hope, in order to rescue some of these children from their terrible physical deprivations and torments. The children who have grown up in the care of Future Hope sound, in this broadcast anyway, like the very definition of the “deserving poor”. This being a Test Match Special broadcast, you would expect cricket to figure in the story, and it does, although for a long time rugger seems to have been a bigger deal than cricket for Future Hope. Is Grandage a rugger enthusiast, I wonder? Indeed he is. Ever since it started, Future Hope has used sport to physically improve, to socialise and to excite its charges, and generally to give them positive and amusing things to think, and thereby helping to take their minds off past miseries. But India being India, Future Hope also wants to develop its cricket. The England Cricket Team have got involved, and they recently spent a day at Future Hope, as the broadcast describes. England’s formidable new captain, Alastair Cook, opened their new cricket coaching operation for them. Good for him. This is the first time I have ever heard about Future Hope, and I have no idea if it really is as good a thing as Jonathan Agnew and the Future Hope people he talked to made it sound. These days, you can’t help but be slightly concerned about such a phenomenon. But it did sound like a very good thing indeed. And I want to believe that if there were any doubts about its excellence, the England cricket team would not have gone anywhere near it. December 7th, 2012 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
It’s the NHS first got me thinking how the power of the narrative distorts so much of how organisations & ideas are viewed. This one starts; “Staffed by dedicated doctors & caring nurses the British National Health Service is the envy of the world…” It runs for a couple of paragraphs, was first written the day before its inception & has been repeated so many times it’s probably encoded somewhere down in our DNA by now. It’s not just that the public believe it. Almost everyone connected to the NHS do as well. Doctors, nurses, administrators, politicians. Even most of the media. It makes it impossible for any of them to view it with a clear eye. The incidents quoted above… others much worse we’ve heard about in the last few years… they should be part of the narrative as well but it just rewrites itself over them. Edits them away so the next time comes as exactly the same shock as the one before & the one before that. No-one actually learns any lessons or does anything because the narrative reassures them it’s not necessary. They’re just aberrations. Momentary & inexplicable blips in an otherwise perfect system. Or just signs that even more money needs tipping into it. That the engine that’s coughing & banging & spewing out smoke & broken parts would be running as sweet as a sewing machine with just a little more fuel. – Commenter ‘Bloke in Spain’ December 6th, 2012 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
“To some extent the problem is too much rather than too little imagination. With fiat money, and a discretionary central bank, it’s always theoretically possible to have the money stock (or some other nominal variable) behave just like it ought to, according to whichever macroeconomic theory or model one prefers. In other words, a modern central bank is always technically capable of doing the right thing, just as a chimpanzee jumping on a keyboard is technically capable of typing-out War and Peace.” – George Selgin, as quoted at the excellent Cafe Hayek blog. December 5th, 2012 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
Last night I attended the Adam Smith Institute Christmas Party. Here are ASI President Madsen Pirie and the speaker for the evening, Allister Heath, editor of City A.M., kindly taking the time to pose together for me:  So, there didn’t seem to be any problem about me taking photos. But actually, it rather seemed as if there was. Try as I might, I don’t seem to be able to get away from this theme, in my bloggage of this week. The most famous personage present was a very recognisable Member of Parliament. And in quite a few of my crowd shots, he is to be seen glaring rather angrily, sideways, at my camera, rather than in the direction he ought to be have been looking, so to speak, as if to say: I didn’t come here to be photoed. I came here to get away from all that crap and to be among friends. Fair enough, no pictures of or naming of him. Besides which, the public point made by such gatherings, insofar as there is one, and aside from the matter of everyone having a fine old time and fine old natter, catch-up, etc., was not so much the quality of those present, qualitative though it definitely was, as the quantity of that quality. These people were not merely rather impressive. There were a lot of them:  That’s Heath holding forth, and that’s the front of his audience. This is the back of his audience:  Spot the join. Unless my eyes are seriously deceiving me, you can’t. I am pretty sure there is no join to spot, and that there were further people present, to the right of those at the front, and to the left of those at the back. My camera has a gratifyingly wide angle of vision, but was not nearly wide enough in its vision for this gathering, given where I was standing. As to the content of Heath’s remarks, well, anyone who knows their City A.M. will know that he is in a pretty gloomy state of mind about the immediate prospects of the British economy. There was a copy of City A.M. in the lobby, and I took notes (with my camera) of stories with headlines like UK is facing a lost decade for growth and More Yuletide misery for the City as well as Allister’s own editorial of that morning, entitled Politicians need to stop moralising – and reform our taxes. His editorial today is entitled A case of lies, damn lies and our rocketing national debt. And as if to match that mood, most of us were dressed in “office attire”, meaning dark and funerial. Even I broke the habits of a decade and dressed funerially. It neither looked nor felt like a Christmas Party. The only thing Allister Heath could think of to cheer us up was to say that for all the governmental mismanagement of our country’s finances, at least technology continues to advance, although no thanks to us. He mentioned, in particular, Google’s robot cars, which is a story that I have been attending to myself for quite some time, and which I intend to blog about here Real Soon Now. The end of Heath’s talk was hijacked by this guy:  Yes it’s Andrew Ian Dodge, presenting some Andrew Ian Dodge for Senator propaganda to Eamonn Butler, so that Eamonn Butler can exhibit it, somewhere. Now there‘s a man who has no problem about being photographed. Councillor Harry Phibbs, top right, is not impressed by this pushy American. This guy, on the other hand, preferred to hide his face behind his iPad:  Well, no not really. He was taking a photo, of me. December 5th, 2012 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
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