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.
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This is an attempt to get an Instalanche, so he will probably ignore it just to make the point that he doesn’t do Instalanches for anything that flat out asks for it. Although, on the other hand …
Either way, two recent objects of linkage at Instapundit in recent times have been Climategate and Goldman Sachs. Well, this Climategate email, spotted by Bishop Hill commenter “GS” (3:27pm), concerns Goldman Sachs, so the Prof ought at least to be interested:
Goldman Sachs #4092
date: Mon, 18 May 1998 10:00:38 +0100
from: Trevor Davies
subject: goldman-sachs
to: REDACTED,REDACTED,REDACTED
Jean,
We (Mike H) have done a modest amount of work on degree-days for G-S. They now want to extend this. They are involved in dealing in the developing
energy futures market.
G-S is the sort of company that we might be looking for a ‘strategic alliance’ with. I suggest the four of us meet with ?? (forgotten his name) for an hour on the afternoon of Friday 12 June (best guess for Phil & Jean – he needs a date from us). Thanks.
Trevor
Instapundit has also long been interested by the BBC, as a phenomenon of more than local interest. So I would also recommend to him, and to people generally, a read through of the Bishop Hill comment two down from that one above, this time from “ThinkingScientist” (3:41pm). He copies and pastes an email from a BBC Producer to Keith Briffa, about how Briffa must “prove” (the BBC Producer’s inverted commas) in a BBC TV show that there is something very extreme about the supposed current warming spurt. In other words, Briffa must put the C (for catastrophic) in CAGW.
GW for global warming has clearly been happening, although it is not nearly so clear that it is still happening now. (Anyone who denies the second is routinely accused of denying the first.) A for anthropogenic GW is widely believed in, but its scale and even existence are matters of fierce controversy. It’s that C for catastrophic on the front of AGW that this is all about. For a power grab this big, there has to be a C in there.
LATER: And, we have our Instalanche. Many thanks sir. (And thanks to the commenter who corrected my earlier wrong spelling of Instalanche.)
It is time for the simple debate to end and all out war to begin. The Edison bulb bannings by the global class of intellectual Aristocrats is the step too far. To assist all in declaring their allegiance I have generated this handy war logo which could double as a war pennant:
Down with the Greens!
Graphic: copyright Dale Amon, Released under Creative Commons license.
It is hard to believe that great and articulate thorn in the side of the left, William Buckley, has been gone for four years. What would he think of what has transpired since? A friend of his discusses that question and gives us a clarion call of resistance from the great man’s own words:
“I will not,” Bill wrote,
cede more power to the state. I will not willingly cede more power to anyone, not to the state, not to General Motors, not to the CIO. I will hoard my power like a miser, resisting every effort to drain it away from me. I will then use my power as I see fit. I mean to live my life an obedient man, but obedient to God, subservient to the wisdom of my ancestors; never to the authority of political truths arrived at yesterday at the voting booth.
To which I will only add, Amen.
Resistance is not futile. It only takes 15% of a population opting out to bring any overbearing state to its knees. We only need a 15% Galt factor to completely spike the socialist enterprise.
We’ve already killed all the dumb terrorists, so all that’s left are the smart ones.
– I heard an American voice saying that, in connection with the ongoing war in Afghanistan, while I was transferring a recording I had made of a show called The World’s Deadliest Arms Race (shown in the UK about a month ago on Channel 4 TV) from my TV hard disc onto a DVD.
One of the best things about recording TV shows, as opposed to merely watching them, is being able to wind back and find out exactly who said something of particular interest, and exactly what it consisted of. The above words, I quickly learned, were spoken by a big, tough guy in a black T-shirt by the name of Marine Staff Sergeant Jack Pierce. They come right near the end of the show, which lasts just over forty five minutes.
Ssgt. Pierce was reflecting on how he and the rest of the crew of the vehicle they were all in were subjected to attack with an I(mprovised) E(xplosive) D(evice). Six of the crew were badly wounded, including Ssgt. Pierce who is now paralysed from the chest downwards. The other two died instantly.
Newton, Maxwell, Einstein and Tim Blair have described the universe. Blair’s Law is “the ongoing process by which the world’s multiple idiocies are becoming one giant, useless force”.
On the 15th November, the Guardian gave over its comment pages to people from Occupy London. Most of the resulting articles were produced by earnest but weak-minded hippies. Two of the articles made the hippies look sensible.
The first of these was sad. It was the last of a set of three mini-articles by Occupiers on welfare, education and law; the law part being by written by a person “commonly known as dom.” It is important to him that you use that formulation, including the lack of an initial capital letter. He says,
Most days I walk around the site teaching people about the legal system, about the law, about how they’re being enslaved by a body of rules and statutory instruments. The prison without bars is made by bits of paper.
Bits of paper like your birth certificate. All registered names are Crown copyright. The legal definition of registration is transfer of title ownership, so anything that’s registered is handed over to the governing body; the thing itself is no longer yours. When you register a car, you’re agreeing to it not being yours – they send you back a form saying you’re the “registered keeper”. It’s a con. That’s why I say I’ve never had a name.
I must stress that I do not dispute the right of the entity commonly known as dom to call himself what he pleases, and in politeness I shall act in accordance with his preferences if ever I meet him. Apparently he wears one of those jester’s hats with bells on it. Later in the piece he suggests that we google “lawful rebellion”. I did, and soon it came to me that I had heard that phrase before, on this post and others on the EU Referendum site. That post in turn links to a site called The British Constitution Group. One glance at the site is enough to show its appeal to libertarians, Tory Anarchists and allied trades. I want to like it. I’m usually a complete sucker for a bit of Magna Carta and the Rights of Englishmen. But on reading around the various links within the site, not that complete. Someone has been reading too much Artemis Fowl. In those books, if you recall, a fairy cannot enter a human dwelling unless invited in. In the British Constitution Group website under the heading “CONSENT – The Most Important Word in the English Language” you will see the following:
An essential part of the arrest procedure is to read you your rights and then ask you ‘do you understand’ – the word ‘understand’ is synonymous with ‘stand-under’ – they are asking you whether you are prepared to ‘stand-under’ their authority… and when you answer yes – you are giving your consent.
…And because Persephone had eaten food in Hades, be it only six pomegranate seeds, she was doomed to return there. The concept of the hero being safe so long as he does not inadvertently perform some symbolic act that gives his enemies power over him is an ancient one and has great mythic power, but do not try this on irritable cops late at night.
The second Guardian article, by one Jon Witterick, was more clued-up and more sinister than the one by t.p.c.k.a.dom. Its title is Yes, defaulting on debts is an option. At first I thought it was about the financial situation in Greece and passed on to another story, thus nearly missing the tale of how Jon Witterick has avoided paying his debts and how, he claims, you can too. The key idea seems to be that debts cannot be sold on, and once again we meet the concept that you are safe so long as you do not speak the forbidden words:
I also realised how debt collectors trick us into contracts with them, by asking us how much we could pay. When you agree to one pound a month, which costs more to administrate, they now have a contract with you, where none existed
Topping and tailing this admission of fraud and theft are a genuinely pitiable account of what it is like to be pursued by debt collectors and a genuinely repulsive attempt to argue that his decision not to pay what he owes is Iceland writ small. He does not say what he spent the money on, back before he decided it was not real.
Witterick’s website, to which I prudishly will not link, contains the following message:
→ Continue reading: Freemen of the land: an instance of Blair’s Law
Last Tuesday Detlev Schlichter gave another talk, one of several that he is doing around now in various parts of the world, on Paper Money Collapse. Last Tuesday’s talk was organised by the Adam Smith Institute. I attended this talk and can vouch for the fact that the audience was such that it was standing room only by the time it started, partly thanks (or so I was told the following day) to this City AM report of an interview that they recently did with Schlichter.
This talk is now available for viewing on video, a fact which I learned at Libertarian Home, thanks to a posting there by Andy Janes, who describes it as having been “very impressive, if terrifying”. Indeed. You can watch it there. It lasts just under fifty minutes.
“For what it’s worth, I have yet to meet a British eurosceptic who is enjoying the economic turmoil on our doorstep. It is plainly in our interest that the eurozone-which takes 40 per cent of our exports, and comprises our allies and friends-should flourish. That’s precisely why we are alarmed at the readiness of eurocrats to sacrifice their peoples’ prosperity so as to keep their monetary union together. Not that Norman Davies is much interested in what eurosceptics actually think. One of the oddities of the whole debate is that euroenthusiastic commentators who are quick to spot prejudice in others when it comes to racism, sexism or xenophobia are quite unable to detect it in themselves when it comes to people who don’t share their Weltanschauung. (By the way, Professor Davies, one uses nouvel before a masculine noun beginning with a vowel – le nouvel an, but le nouveau franc. When loftily dismissing people as anti-Europeans, it’s a good idea to get your own French right.)”
– Daniel Hannan, MEP, having a go, among others, at the historian Norman Davies.
Nice comment at the Bishop’s, on this, about “Climategate 2”, from “simon” (4:35pm):
I so hate it when my vicar quotes from the Bible. I can’t take such quotes seriously as they are out of context.
Perhaps the institution of the Samizdata quote of the day should be abolished. Time and time again, we here quote quotes, out of context.
Not all of the snippets that are now doing the rounds of the anti-CAGW blogosphere strike me as being as damning as some of them are. But, if anyone chooses to wonder about the degree of wickedness revealed by any particular snippet, it is the work of a moment for that person to find the context, this being one of the features of the internet. Provided, in presenting your preferred snippet, you supply the means of inspecting its context, then you have at least supplied the means by which your interpretation of the snippet may be challenged. And some of the snippets are very damning indeed.
If you are caught saying you are guilty only half as many times as the prosecution lawyer says you have been caught, that still makes you guilty.
Earlier in the thread, Viv Evans (4:02pm) says:
This ‘out-of-context’ excuse is favoured and generally used by shifty politicians who try to defend their misdeeds.
Indeed. And shifty politicians is exactly what these people are.
I trust that simon and Viv Evans will forgive me for quoting them out of context.
It is hard to keep up with the unfolding events of the eurozone debt crisis. Earlier this week, the auction by the German government of 10-year bonds, which is an event normally garnering only specialist coverage, made big news. It was, in the words of several news-sites, a disaster, with only some of the paper being bought.
With impeccable timing, therefore, the Institute of Economic Affairs, the UK-based free market think tank, held a panel debate last night around the question of whether the euro has a future. And an interesting collection of folk were on display: Prof Philip Booth, Editorial & Programme Director, IEA; William Cash, Conservative MP for Stone and a long-standing eurosceptic and loather of most things around the European Union; Ed Conway, Economics Editor, Sky News, Dominic Raab, Conservative MP for Esher and Walton, and finally, and in my view, most memorably, John Stevens, a former member of the European Parliament.
Stevens was memorable because, while he made some good arguments (such as that return to the drachma would cause severe problems for the Greeks in some ways), he also repeated a mistaken old argument that I occasionally hear from pro-EU/euro types.
The argument goes something like this: Small states (like the old city-states of Italy or wherever) cannot thrive on their own and need to be part of a bigger country. The European Union enables its members to punch with a heavier weight than alone. The old glories of Renaissance Italy only serve as a reminder of how small states lose their edge to bigger entities. And with China and India on the rampage, we need to stick together, despite the odd problem of making the project work.
Okay, that is a bit of a paraphrase, but in essentials that is what Stevens said last night. Like others in the audience, I smelled something a bit fishy about it. For a start, is it really the case that the prosperity of small states/principalities/whatever – like 15th Century Milan – could not be sustained alone and that these places had to merge or be taken over by a much bigger entity in order to survive? (It is not as if modern Italy, which was only unified 150 years ago, is an economic colossus as a result of said unification). Take Hong Kong, for instance. In geographic terms, it is tiny compared with the Chinese mainland and for reasons most Samizdata regulars will be familiar with, Hong Kong has been one of the great economic success stories since the Second World War. (For sure, it was a British colony until 1997 but plenty of other places were colonies and they did not thrive). The same goes for Singapore. Or to travel back in time a bit: the UK – hardly a big country – Switzerland (ditto) or the Netherlands. In the latter example, the Dutch were so lacking in room that rather than conquer a bunch of neighbours, they reclaimed land from the sea. The Swiss seem to be doing rather well, despite the pressures on their discreet banking sector. In fact, places such as Switzerland are a standing reproach to Transnational Progressivists generally.
And in any event, what all these examples of economically successful small states show is that they can survive and thrive so long as they can trade in a global marketplace, exploiting a wide division of labour. It is not necessary – pace Stevens and his allies – to create a centralised institution such as the EU or anything else in order for this trading to occur. So long as different jurisdictions recognise each other’s rules, trade can proceed. In that sense, any regulatory system that takes hold is a “bottom-up” phenomenon, not one imposed from above.
It should also be noted that if, by any chance, the eurozone does fracture, with some of the “northern” euro member countries operating a stronger currency than in the “south”, then this might ultimately work to the benefit of the people for whom the single currency was purportedly designed: the citizens of EU member states.
As an aside, I was pleased that Prof Booth last night pointed out that for economic liberals/libertarians, the issue that really counts is whether the arrangements we arrive at really do mean more, rather than less, movement of goods, services and people. Or, in other words, more freedom, period. No classical liberal can be happy at the prospect of a eurozone collapse being followed by a descent into autarky, protectionism and xenophobia.
Here, by the way, is an interesting book on the folly of empires.
Are Ridley Scott’s falling petals, which he seems to like so much that he puts them in his films over and over again, anything more than a way to gussy up the triumph of oligarchy, corporate capital and globalisation?
– Rick Moody, in a Guardian article entitled Frank Miller and the rise of cryptofascist Hollywood
One of the Chicago Boyz, the one who goes by the name “onparkstreet”, recently posted a question that I had pretty much given up asking myself at all regularly: Where Have You Been Whit Stillman?
He links to this, where we encounter the news that, wherever Whit Stillman may have been for the last decade (while apparently failing to finish other movies) he is now back in business, with a new, completed and ready-to-view movie called Damsels in Distress. I’m about a month behind the news on this, but frankly, I don’t pay much attention to the latest movies any more, so I’m not that surprised that it took me this long to learn of Stillman’s return.
A movie which apparently stars four girls doesn’t much appeal to me. I tend to prefer chick flicks to implausibly violent costume dramas set either in a violent past or a violent future, but I like my chick flicks not to be too chicky, so to speak. I like men to join in and do occasional manly things, like hit one another and lie and be unaware of people’s feelings, in among all the chick chat. In Metropolitan, Stillman’s first movie and my favourite of his, blows and loud insults are exchanged, in among all that witty dialogue with its deftly constructed sentences which begin, continue and then end, just as if someone had written them out beforehand. In Barcelona someone has his eye shot out.
But how much damage are four damsels going to do to anyone? How often will they give me a rest from girls being receptive to each others’ feelings, and get the plot motoring properly by injecting relieving doses of insensitivity and uncaringness?
I will definitely make a point of seeing this latest Stillman movie, and judging by what is said in postings like this, I may quite enjoy it, and maybe enjoy it a lot. Nevertheless, I will be hoping for it to be more enjoyable than I will be fearing it to be.
A Janes email newsletter this week reports that:
Israel retains strike option as IAEA strips away Iranian nuclear facade
Israel plans to give the international community time to draft and impose a series of tough sanctions against Iran in relation to its nuclear programme but has not ruled out the possibility of pre-emptive military action at a later date, Jane’s understands from senior government officials. Their comments followed the 8 November publication of an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report expressing concern based on mounting evidence that Iran is pursuing the development of nuclear weapons, conducting research and tests that are only relevant for the design of a weapon
Next thing you know, they will discover that Israel has teeth enough to respond to an attack or threat… in kind.
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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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