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]
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After parting from Jim Bennett at the Roosevelt Hotel, I had to get a shot of this classic bit of Capitalism. You feel wealthy just looking at it.
There is just a classy sexuality to the old Rolls that could never come out of the greyness of socialism.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
Instead of staying underground and taking the S train, I walked back through midtown. I always enjoy just passing through Times Square. It is never the same twice. Today I was surprised at the big Xinhua News adverts on the highest and probably priciest of the computer screens which have come to dominate the place.
I sometimes wonder if I am in Times Square or crossed over into a Cyberpunk novel.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
The screens now cover the entire surfaces of some buildings in constantly shifting images.
New York or Shanghai? The world just keeps shrinking.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
I had to stop and take a photo of this advert on the wall of the 42nd Street Metro station near the stairs down to the A Train platform. I should not have been surprised by it, given that the Palestinians were asking the UN to tell them they are a State. In my opinion, based on what I hope happens out in the solar system with some Libertarian settlement someday, you do not ask the UN to be a state. You tell them. Of course the other side of this coin is that you try to make friends with your neighbors because if you shoot at them in a Libertarian world, they *will* shoot back…
Is it really peace with Israel they want or is it Israel in pieces?
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
Jim Bennett was in town the last few days for a small and intense colloquium in which he had the opportunity to interact at length with Vaclav Klaus, the outspoken free-market President of Czechoslovakia. It was not until Saturday morning that we were able to get together and I arranged for Taylor Dinerman, one of our sometimes Samizdata writers, to join us for lunch. Given the nature of our conversation over burgers and Guinness I half expected to see leftish types holding their hands over their ears and running for the doors lest they hear free-market, pro-capitalist ideas. Why, one of our motley threesome was even an outspoken Republican. Oh, the Horror, the Horror!
Neither Jim nor I have had an opportunity to make the pilgrimage to the World Trade Center site in some years. I have less excuse than Jim on this matter as I pass through Manhattan so often. I just have not ‘got around to it’.
There is no comparison between what I last saw and now. When you walk down Church Street and arrive at Vesey street the new building is just THERE. For me the mood for the visit was set by the passenger jet which just happened to pass by in the frame as I took one of my first series of photos.
This image set my mood for a somber remembrance.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
The other buildings are equally fine and are rising quickly as well.
I just liked the framing…
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
We had some difficulty figuring out where to go for a view of the new museum but finally did find one.
First glimpse of the new museum.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
In the process we also found much better sight lines for the new complex.
When complete this is going to be a magnificent set of buildings.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
You are never far from something which reminds you of the gravitas and the sheer holiness of this place. Reverent songs will be sung on planets of far stars of the courage of the Fireman of New York.
We will never forget.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
Although I took a number of photos with Jim in them, I liked the backdrop in this even though he was somewhat dwarfed by it. I do not think Jim will mind.
Author and pioneer space entrepreneur Jim Bennett.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
I have been following news on China’s supposed near monopoly on rare earth elements for some time now and reports like this one seem to bear out my opinion that things will settle out quickly. There are other projects around the world which can produce these important high technology elements. They have only been kept out of production because the Chinese were selling at prices lower than Western production could support.
So the good news is, we got materials at low prices from the Chinese for years and created new wealth from them. And the other good news is, their attempt to extract a windfall profit is likely to fall on its face. And even better news is that one of the important new mines will be in Nebraska so even if the National Socialist Republic of California pushes prices from the old mines there into a range that keeps them closed, we will still be pulling them out of the ground in one of the Free States.
“It is not beyond Germany’s financial power to rescue the ailing eurozone countries. But the increase in political power for Germany which such a rescue implies is surely way beyond what most of the people of Europe would accept. The Germans do not want it either: in agreeing to create the ECB, they willed the means, but not the end. Now that the end is nigh, they are terrified. What Europe faces, then, is a disaster that was predictable – and predicted – and is now unavoidable. In the process, millions will lose their jobs, an entire generation will miss the opportunities which their parents enjoyed, and blood will probably be shed. The rulers of Europe have never been so wrong since the late 1930s.”
Charles Moore. His remarks about such EUrophiles such as Chris Patten (remember that pompous arse?), FT journalist Lionel Barber, Hugo Young and of course, Jacques Delors (remember him also?) are gloriously scathing.
By the way, here are two books, one by John Laughland, and the other by Bernard Connolly, written some time ago on the architects of the modern EU. I don’t agree with all of their ideas, but they were remarkably prescient in certain respects. Laughland, for example, picks up on Hayek’s point about the dangers of politicised money, which is essentially what fiat money usually is.
In case anyone asks, I certainly don’t endorse Laughland’s nationalistic views on the treatment of people such as Slobodan Milosovic. . That is a subject for another day.
Strange is it not? We get some small backing of commercial procurement of space services from the current NASA administration and what do Republican’s do? Why they back the same old Socialist space approach that came into being to match the Russian Socialist model in the Moon race.
Then they try to hang the monstrosity of a super heavy lift vehicle on NASA… but this time around the parentage is quite clear. Certain Senators designed this vehicle, or at least set the parameters. NASA did not even want the thing, or at least the people at the top did not. (Admittedly, there are a lot of folk in the lower hierarchy and at the Centers who have lived their lives in a ‘government knows best’ cocoon and who think the solution to every problem in exploration is a bigger rocket.)
The current system is an utter bollocks. The Senate insisted NASA come up with a design; and behind the scenes it was made clear that it must contain solid rocket engines made in Utah. It also includes features that ensure an ongoing standing army to service it in Florida and crowds of workers for Tennessee and Texas…
It will never fly. The sole and single purpose of this vehicle is to employ people in those States. When the unbearable cost of this ridiculous Senatorial design becomes apparent to all, it will be cancelled. There will then be hearings, hand wringing… and they will try to foist a ‘new’ program on us to keep the pork barrel jobs going.
This frankenstein will cost $30B over its life cycle. It will fly every only once in every one or two years; it will require a standing army that will be training and working and getting paid in the mean timel; it will cost perhaps $2B per flight; it will suck up most of a declining NASA budget at the expense of everything else; and it will not take a human being into space until 2021.
Yes, folks, this is your Senate at work. Not NASA… this time at least.
I enjoyed listening to this Mark Steyn radio interview the other day. He gets seriously worked up and he’s very effective in that medium, as well as in print. The show that I link to here has its advertisement segments. One ad, for some sort of investment trading product, talks about all kinds of clever trading ideas, but it had this jarring note, if I remember: “You don’t get rich by saving money”.
That’s the current financial disaster in a nutshell. Saving money, accumulating wealth and investing it in productive assets such as businesses, is for saps. And with negative real interest rates (thanks to Messrs Bernanke, Greenspan and chums), saving money in the traditional way is a mug’s game.
When the culture of steady wealth accumulation and savings is mocked like this, it adds up over time.
Recently a friend told me something about kibbutzes (kibbutzim?) in Israel, which got me into speculation mode. My friend had, he told me, met quite a few people in the course of his various globetrottings who, attracted by the aura of idealism and general world-savingness that kibbutzes radiate, had spent time in a kibbutz. Such pilgrims, said my friend, had quite soon left, all of them disgusted by the experience. Far from being havens of a higher form of humanity, kibbutzes are incubators of nastiness and personal backbiting and unpleasantness of all kinds. Kibbutz life, said these people, had cured them of socialism for ever. Which makes me speculate that kibbutzes are, for this reason, a spectacularly good thing, for the people thus inoculated, and for the world, in more ways than I can count in a short blog posting.
The only kind of people said my friend, who live well in kibbutzes are, well, the kind of people who live well in kibbutzes. People who thrive under totalitarian socialism, basically. Good at politics, good at screwing people without appearing too obviously to screw them, in accordance with the rules of rigid egalitarianism. There are lots of rules, to suppress individualism, getting ahead, getting richer, and so on, and the individuals who understand these rules use them ruthlessly to get ahead, and even, if you are flexible about how you measure wealth, to get wealthy.
These “alpha personalities”, as my friend described them, stick around, ruling the kibbutz with a rod of egalitarian iron. Many of the people lower down the Greek alphabet, without whom these alphas would presumably be rather helpless, are the transients, some of whom my friend had talked with. Young idealists, for whom life on a kibbutz is some kind of rite of Jewish passage. They arrive, serve their time until they can stand it no longer, and leave, taking with them an education in the realities of egalitarian collectivism that is given to few others in what is basically, still, a moderately free world. They experience such a regime good and hard, in a form that they can contrast with a life outside that kibbutz that is still massively freer, and then leave, taking that knowledge with them.
So, in addition to being one of the great new hubs of technological innovation in the world, the state of Israel, by permitting with its laws (including, presumably, a law which says that kibbutzes may not imprison those who no longer consent to being there), and encouraging with its ideological traditions, master classes in the realities of collectivism, is doing the world another huge favour. Kibbutzes are, you might say, re-education camps for precisely the sort of people who most require such re-education, and at a time in their lives soon enough to make a huge difference, to them and to the world.
I am a huge admirer of that human semi-collectivity called Jews, and pretty much an uncritical supporter of the state of Israel in its ongoing struggle to stay in existence and to flourish. But, and please do not misunderstand this next bit, I sort of agree with some of the more admiring bits in the ravings of the world’s many anti-semites, present and past. Jews are rather special. A century ago or so, Jews did have an influence on the world that was far greater than their mere numbers would seem to have allowed. (I am a classical music fan, and the sheer scale of the Jewish presence in that world has been and remains extraordinary.) It did not follow from the super-achievements of Jews that therefore the Jews were evil and should all be murdered, and it does not follow now. But, they were a group of people very much to be reckoned with, and they surely still are, again way beyond their mere numbers in the world.
I therefore now surmise that an ongoing education programme, which turns energetic, adventurous and idealistic young Jews from devotees of collectivism in devotees of something more like the opposite, has got to be one of the very best things now going on in the world.
But, this is pretty much all speculation on my part. The question mark at the end of my heading is no mere afterthought. I admire Israel from afar, but have never been there, nor have I travelled very much in the world. (Maybe if I spent more time in Isreal, I would admire it less.) So I end with all the usual questions which thinking-aloud, but-what-do-I-know?, guess postings of this kind generally do and always should end with. Does any of the above make sense to any of our commentariat? In particular, how do the above speculations strike any readers of this who have pertinent knowledge of the matters I speculate about, of the sort which I do not have, beyond that small item of chat from a friend?
I can well imagine that kibbutzes might indeed do a bit of the good I describe, but be doing a lot more harm in other ways. Also, my friend, being of a strongly anti-collectivist inclination himself, could have been suffering from severe selection error. Maybe the world is full of Jews who have lived in a kibbutz and would like nothing less than to kibbutzise the entire world. But, I like to think not.
“But even if there had been no march, the Okies would have been made obsolete by the depression. The histories of depressions show that a period of economic chaos is invariably followed by a period of extremely rigid economic controls – during which all the variables, the only partially controllable factors like commodity speculation, unlimited credit, free marketing, and competitive wages will get shut out.”
Cities In Flight, by James Blish, pages 421-422. From the multi-edition book published by Gollancz. Copyright 1970.
The book has many interesting themes for science fiction fans and interestingly, commodity-based money is a key plot device. The date of the copyright is interesting – it is just a year before Richard Nixon finally severed any link between the dollar and gold, to his everlasting shame.
Here is a nice appreciation of Blish over at “Templeton Gate 3.0”.
With great effort our Samizdatista spies in the US Senate have uncovered the deepest secrets of the Senator/Rocket Scientists plans for a $30B Super Heavy Jobs Lifter!
Senate Rocket Scientists plans unveiled!
Montage and Gimping: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
A regular commenter and occasional writer for Samizdata, Paul Marks, has recently, over at the Counting Cats blog, taken aim at the output of John Le Carre and in particular, the George Smiley character that got one of its most famous outings in the Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy novel (now a film starring Gary Oldman). I remember watching the old TV series starring the late, very great Alec Guinness. For what it’s worth, I enjoyed the series a lot and how it showed George Smiley, with a few associates, track down the identity of the mole inside UK intelligence. (If you don’t want to know who the mole is, Paul Marks’ item gives him away immediately, which is a naughty thing to do without a warning).
Of course, the role of spies, the nature of spying and the Cold War confrontations in which they were involved produced an interesting genre of work that continues to appeal even now that some of the issues have changed. I always felt that Le Carre tried a bit too hard to show how he wasn’t a vulgar entertainer such as Ian Fleming, say, or for that matter, John Buchan. And I imagine he positively disdains such thriller writers as Vince Flynn, Tom Clancy or Brad Thor. (These are more overtly about action rather than spying, anyway).
For me, my favourite spy stories of all time are as follows:
From Russia with Love (Ian Fleming)
Journey into Fear (Eric Ambler)
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (John Le Carre);
The Ipcress File (Len Deighton)
Under Western Eyes (Joseph Conrad).
The “Hook, Line and Sinker” trilogy by Len Deighton is also wonderful, by the way. And anything by Eric Ambler is good.
Jack Straw, sometime Justice Secretary, is on a campaign against referral fees in accident insurance claims. Claims management companies (CMCs) busily ferret out details of accidents that people have suffered, and sell on the details to solicitors who will encourage the victims to sue, on a no-win-no-fee basis. Mr Straw and many like him claim this pushes up legal costs that will eventually have to be paid by insured people generally. Furthermore, it encourages that wicked thing, the ‘compensation culture’, the habit of demanding that someone be to blame for every misfortune we suffer and should pay up accordingly. Mr Straw says referral fees are:
a lucrative and self-serving merry-go-round in which the personal information of anyone involved in any collision with another vehicle, no matter how trivial its effects, is traded like a commodity, typically for £600 to £800 a shot, with the aim of pursuing a claim – any claim – provided that it brings rich rewards to all those involved in this industry.
He reckons that whiplash injuries claimed by car occupants after being shunted from behind are largely fictitious – it seems they’re difficult to diagnose, so such claims are hard to refute.
In fact, one Dr Simon Margolis, CEO of something called the Premex Group, while trying to counter Straw, ends up by making him seem more credible:
There is no blood test or imaging modality currently in existence that can prove or disprove an injury was sustained or whether symptoms are being experienced. That is why a combination of the taking of a history and the laying on of hands during clinical examination by a medical expert remains the appropriate approach. Much can be learned from the general demeanour of the claimant and the way the history is delivered.
“The laying on of hands”! I love that. Much can be learned from the general demeanour of industry apologists.
Straw’s beef seems to be another instance of the ancient complaint against middlemen in general: people can’t see what service they provide and think they just push up prices. I compare the referral-fee example with the old complaint against advertising: when I buy a can of beans I have to pay the costs of the advertising that persuaded me to buy it. Outrageous!
The same answer applies to both cases, I suppose: in claims management, the middlemen actually reduce costs and push up the effectiveness of the whole system by matching up buyers and sellers, and encouraging buyers (accident victims) to buy (sue). If CMCs are squashed, lawyers will have to do the job themselves, or use other means to attract custom.
Jack Straw’s proposals are bound to make the whole process of getting justice less efficient – if that’s imaginable. But his private member’s bill has been read in the Commons without opposition, regrettably.
To bring legal costs down we need the process of linking up providers and consumers to be untrammelled. We also need police, judges and lawyers who do their jobs efficiently. Fat chance of that in the oldest of nationalized industries.
Maybe whiplash injury claims are largely a scam. I’d rather leave it to the people with a direct financial interest in showing this – namely, the insurers – to sort that out, rather than to the medical expertise of Jack Straw.
A lot of people are sceptical about whether no-win-no-fee improves the quality of justice. It may not be the whole answer, but it’s certainly part of the answer. If I ever found myself inside an ambulance I would want to see an ambulance-chasing lawyer hard on its heels. And I’d want some clever type in a sharp suit to introduce us.
The Tea Party, perhaps more than any other contemporary movement, brings out the ‘Yeah, but what they’re really saying…’ tendency. The ‘tea’ stands for ‘Taxed Enough Already’ but, if you relied on the BBC and the Guardian for your information, you might not know it. Many Lefties pretend – or perhaps have genuinely convinced themselves – that the Tea Party is clandestinely protesting against immigration or abortion or the fact of having a mixed race president; anything, in fact, other than what it actually says it’s against, viz big government. The existence of a popular and spontaneous anti-tax movement has unsettled the Establishment. They’d much rather deal with a stupid and authoritarian Right than with a libertarian one. Hence the almost desperate insistence that the Tea Partiers have some secret agenda.
– Daniel Hannan, writing about the extraordinary abuse heaped on the Tea Party crowd. Well, they want to cut taxes and push back the State. I guess they must be psychotic or something.
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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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