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]
Spring is in the air, and there is a spring in the step of the climate skeptic blogs these days, the two big ones on my radar being Bishop Hill and Watts Up With That. Peter Gleick‘s trickery, already written about here by Natalie Solent, combined with the willingness of so many on his team to try to promote him as some kind of hero rather than condemn him as the failed fraudster that he is (see also this posting about Michael Mann), means that although climate skepticism hasn’t won, it continues to win. Slowly but surely, C(atastrophic) A(thropogenic) G(lobal) W(arming) is being reduced from “science” to a racket.
Declarations of complete victory are surely premature. Much depends on how you define victory, and who or what you consider to be the enemy. If you care only about scientific truth, but not about the world being littered with damaging and expensive bureaucracies dedicated to perpetuating and enforcing lies, you may well indeed believe this battle to be nearly over. If those bureaucracies (to say nothing of the larger financial and ideological interests they serve) still trouble you, as they do me, you will regard the war as hardly having begun.
Some are saying that continuing to argue about the mere science of it all is a distraction from the more serious task of unmasking the motives and machinations of all those personages to whom all this fraudulent science has been so useful. I disagree. I say that showing this “science” to be dishonest leads naturally on to the question of who patronised it and to what end, given that the mere truth of things was emphatically not the only thing that concerns all those concerned. If the science of CAGW was now, still, universally accepted as honest, the underlying intentions of the various factions and characters responsible for foisting it upon the world would not now be attracting nearly so much scrutiny.
An immediate next task for the skeptic tendency is to itemise and publicise, in greater detail than hitherto, who is making money out of CAGW, a process that is already well under way. The longer term goal is to unmask the politics of it all. The bigger goal behind this hoax (and many others) was, and remains, to turn the entire world into a corrupt tax-and-spend superstate, run for the pleasure and enrichment of anti-progress, screw-the-poor-in-the-name-of-the-poor, global despots. That many very useful and desperately sincere – very useful because so desperately sincere – idiots are and always have been involved in this project is not in question. These idiots need to be challenged intellectually rather than merely denounced as crooks and tyrants, although showing them that crooks and tyrants is who they are really supplying aid and comfort to may also help to straighten them out.
In the post, and I should have read this book months ago: Watermelons. James Delingpole has been a key figure in ensuring that the CAGW ruckus (and the Climategate story in particular) escaped from the ghetto of blogs like the ones I linked to above, into the general arena of political discussion, and even to infect parts of the general public, now so curious to know why their heating bills are going ballistic. The thing about Delingpole is that not only has he done a fine job publicising the various scientific criticisms of the CAGW faith. He also understands what set the whole thing in motion in the first place. He gets the money of it. Above all, he gets the politics of it. When I have read this book, I’ll surely want to say more about it here.
According to a news brief from a Janes newsletter, the move into the realm of what was once science fiction weaponry continues apace:
US Navy receives EM railgun prototype.
The US Navy (USN) has taken delivery and started testing a prototype electromagnetic (EM) railgun from BAE Systems as the service continues to develop a surface ship gun that can fire a projectile 50-100 n miles (93-185 km) without using propellants. General Atomics is due to deliver its competing prototype to the USN’s Office of Naval Research (ONR) in April
*Ineptocracy (in-ep-toc’-ra-cy)* – A system of government where the least capable to lead are elected by the least capable of producing, and where the members of society least likely to sustain themselves or succeed, are rewarded with goods and services paid for by the confiscated wealth of a diminishing number of producers.
This via a comment by our local neighbourhood ‘ukipwebmaster’.
I have though for a while now that this term deserves wider currency and to be used in all seriousness.
Of course, a number of governments, including the late, unlamented one of Tony Blair, were prepared to hold their noses and do business with the now very dead former dictator of Libya, but this story about an alleged £42 million campaign contribution to Nicolas Sarkzoy in 2007, if true, would surely be the end of the diminutive president of France.
Excerpt:
“The “terms” for handing over the money were agreed in a meeting between the two men in Libya two years before Mr Sarkozy’s election, documents published by a French investigative website suggest.A memo obtained by the Mediapart site and handed to a judge alleges that the meeting on Oct 6, 2005 resulted in “campaign financing” of “NS [Nicolas Sarkozy]” being “totally paid”. At the time Mr Sarkozy was France’s interior minister with well-documented ambitions to succeed Jacques Chirac. Political financing laws ban candidates from receiving cash payments above €7,500 (£6,300) but Mediapart claims that €50”‰million mentioned in the memo were laundered through bank accounts in Panama and Switzerland.”
Of course, given the range of poisonous collectivists running for the job of French president, it is very much the case of “none of the above” if I were a citizen of that country and thinking about voting in the upcoming French elections this year.
The founder of the X-Prize (well known around these parts due to events such as the space ventures side of things) now wants to launch a prize for people with good ideas on how to sort out education. (H/T, Instapundit). I can suggest two quick ideas:
Give the prize immediately to Professor James Tooley.
Or, Give it to me, as I have this brilliant idea – just get the state out of education, full stop.
You have to hand it to this government in the UK. Having watched at how the US has demonstrated the foolishness of distorting the housing market in sub-prime mortgages, and hence encouraging a huge “moral hazard” problem, the UK is, according to a report, going to back hundreds of thousands of home loans in measures to be announced in the 21 March budget.
One grows weary. The shoulders sag. It becomes more difficult to think of a smart-arse piece of satire when confronted with the latest cretinous idea to come out of David Cameron’s limited mind, or from the minds of his colleagues.
Over dinner a few weeks ago, Brian Micklethwait and I agreed that Cameron is not, in fact, all that bright, apart, perhaps, from having a sort of superficial, feral cunning.
Seeing as this year marks the bicentenary of the War of 1812 and seeing as I know precious little about it, I thought I’d ask the commentariat the following:
1. Who were the good guys and who were the bad guys?
2. Who won?
In a few days’ time, I am seeing friends and the theme of the evening meal is that all the food is going to follow Roman recipes. No, I don’t mean the kind of thing you order in a restaurant now, I mean the sort of food that Marcus Aurelius might have eaten. Or as described in this book about the Romans by Ferdinand Mount.
“The world financial crisis has provoked a stark feeling of decline among many in the West, particularly citizens of what some call the Anglosphere: the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand. In the United States, for example, roughly 73 percent see the country as on the wrong track, according to an Ipsos MORI poll—a level of dissatisfaction unseen for a generation.”
So write Joel Kotkin and Shashi Parulekar. And as they go on to point out, the idea that the English-speaking nations are in imminent danger of being crushed by some sort of Asian/other menace is – with all due respect to the likes of Mark Steyn and Co, wildly overblown. And of course, given that trade is not a zero-sum game, there is nothing to lose from the hopefully long-term enrichment of countries such as Brazil or India.
This is good, because it shows how reasonable most people consider their government’s existence and demands to be – and because it shows how misled those people are. (I have put this under the Humour category, but I find it rather depressing. Those who can be emotionally detached about these things may laugh, though.)
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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