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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“So far, George Osborne has taken the comfortable line that the eurozone meltdown is nothing much to do with Britain. As a result, he has chosen not to question the shoddy compromises, the straight lies and the probable illegality that have characterised Europe’s response to its greatest financial and political crisis since the 1930s. But the disaster will hit us, too. Britain is a shareholder in the ECB, and Britain is a core part of the bail-out mechanism. It is time that we started to poke our nose in, to demand honesty and transparency, and to stop sending good money after bad. Above all, George Osborne has an urgent duty as Chancellor to construct a firewall that protects Britain as much as is possible from the catastrophe that now looms over Europe.”
– Peter Oborne.
For many months and years, commentators – many of them at the Daily Telegraph – have predicted the eventual collapse of the single European currency. So far, it has failed to happen, if only due to the fanaticism of the European political class. But maybe, just maybe, the endgame is upon us. This is going to be nasty; some big banks could have to write off a huge amount in the way of bad loans.
And to think that a few years ago, it was claimed that the euro could rival, or even overtake, the dollar as a reserve currency. I am still a dollar bear, but who would want to bet on the euro?
I remember reading this book, The Rotten Heart of Europe, when it came out, and its author has that dubious pleasure of being able to say, “I told you so”.
When, in the past, I have posted information about my travels to this blog, people have occasionally commented that the travel sounds great, but that all the time spent in airports and on aircraft must be unpleasant. My response to this is that I go through a lot of airports, but that I do my best to get in and out of them as fast as possible, and I keep my mind on what a miracle air travel actually is and how extraordinarily cheap it is. (I can get up in London and have lunch in Italy, and the lunch can sometimes cost more than the journey).
However, once in a while one has a doosey of an experience, and I had one this morning. I was booked to fly from London Stansted Airport to Bologna in Italy. The flight was due to leave at 7.15am. I got up at an unpleasant 4.30am to leave for the airport. Transport to the airport was uneventful, and I arrived approximately an hour before my flight was due to leave. I was not checking luggage, and walking through the airpot and getting to the front of the security queue meant that I got to the X-Ray machine and metal detector at security by about 6.25am. I took my laptop out of my bag, and put it through the machine separately. The operator of the X-Ray machine apparently decided that there was something in my bag that required manual attention, as occasionally happens. It happens to me more than to most people, because I carry a fair amount of electronic equipment with me: fairly bulky photographic equipment, phones, chargers, a Kindle, accessories for the laptop and an assortment of chargers and adaptors to go with them. Yes, I am one of these people. No, this is not very unusual.
As I said, this happens from time to time. Normally a security person takes my bag off the conveyor belt, and either conducts a manual search of the bag, or tells me to take a particular item out of the bag, and the bag and that item go through the X-Ray machine separately. No big deal, and I am delayed five minutes or less.
However, this morning I discovered that security at Stansted Airport had installed a new system of conveyor belts, and the conveyor belt now forked coming out of the X-Ray machine. Problematic bags that required a manual search now ended up in a separate conveyor belt in a queue of their own. This meant that they did not need to be dealt with immediately to keep the main conveyor belt moving.
So, I waited for someone to deal with my bag. There were four other bags waiting in the queue ahead of mine. The security staff were dealing with various issues, and were being constantly distracted from job to job. They didn’t seem particularly interested in manual searches of bags. When they did start doing a manual bag search, they got distracted by other tasks in the middle of doing so, so that these searches took much longer than they should have. Amazingly, getting to my bag – the fifth in the queue- took more than half an hour. Although I had got to the head of the queue before 6.30am, it was after 7.00am before somebody even started the manual search of my bag. I explained at this point that I was likely to miss my flight, and I was told that
If you miss your flight, it will be your fault. You should have taken your liquids out of your bag as instructed
I had no liquids in my bag, and I explained this. I was then told that I must have left a laptop in my bag. I pointed to my laptop, which I was holding in my hands. I was told that I must have left something I was not supposed to in my bag, as bags were only retained for manual searches when people had ignored the instructions in some way. A further five minutes or more were then taken to inspect the contents of my bag and put my electronic devices through the X-Ray machine again. The person doing this was distracted by other tasks several more times, and the bag search was done slowly and inefficiently.
Thinking about it later, most of the other people in front of me whose bags were subject to manual searches did in fact have liquids in their bags that they had not taken out. This does appear to be the reason for most manual searches. This probably does annoy security staff as it creates extra work for them. This (combined with the “serves you right” response when I mentioned I might miss my flight) makes me suspect that the delays in doing these manual inspections may not be simple incompetence, but something a little more malevolent than that. Surly, resentful employees are going out of their way to inconvenience passengers who are perceived as making things hard for them. All I had done was have a bag with slightly unusual contents. Other people might have accidentally left a laptop in a bag. (I have done this at other airports, and the delay has been perhaps 60 seconds. Not at Stansted today, though). The idiocy of the liquid ban comes into this too. Pointless rules make for pointless jobs and resentful, surly employees. I am still not sure how much of this was incompetence and how much malevolence. A bit of both, I suppose.
As it happened, I did miss my flight. My short trip to Italy is cancelled. I am out of pocket the cost of my non-changeable, non-refundable flight, the cost of transport to the airport, and the cost of one night’s accommodation in Italy, the hotel at which I had a reservation having an “In the event of a same day cancellation, the cost of one night’s accommodation will be charged” policy. Annoying for me, but no fault of any of those businesses, of course. The rental car company (Europcar) with which I had a vehicle booked were nice enough to give me a full refund, however, so I will be doing business with them again. Plus I had got up at 4.30am and wasted a morning for no reason. And I am not sitting beside the Adriatic eating pasta and drinking chianti, which was where I had intended to be this evening, and in fact where I paid good money to be this evening.
So who do I blame for this? The security employees themselves, certainly. Governments who impose stupid security rules, of course. BAA, the company that owns Stansted Airport, certainly. The botched privatisation process of London’s airports, that too. (BAA was a government department that was privatised with a monopoly over London’s airports. It still has the attitude to customer service that one expects from a tax department. Or perhaps the post office. Or the NHS. Or a railway ticket office in Smolensk in 1983. A heavily regulated private sector monopoly that behaves like a government department is not a dramatic improvement on a government department).
To some extent complaining about security procedures at airports is like complaining about the fact that water is wet. These things just are. However, I cannot help but think that an appropriate level of outrage is appropriate.
Rob Fisher has a couple of postings up about coffee, which I enjoyed reading. I am strictly a Gold Blend man myself, and am as interested in the structural qualities of coffee jars as I am in their contents, but even I notice how the price of Gold Blend can fluctuate quite wildly, which is what the second of Rob’s coffee postings is about.
In the first and more substantial of Rob’s coffee postings, the whole matter of Fair Trade coffee is gone into. Like many free marketeers, I assume this to be a fairly (actually not that fairly) foolish enterprise, better at separating money from dimwitted Westerners than at helping poor coffee growers in faraway countries. But what are the facts? Read Rob to learn more, and also read Has Bean, the quality coffee blog which Rob links to and discusses some of the content of.
Unlike me, Rob does care a lot about the quality of his coffee, having just purchased a coffee grinder. Apparently, the smaller the time gap between grinding and drinking, the better the coffee tastes. Unless you prefer Gold Blend.
David Friedman, the academic, libertarian and enthusiast for things such as Medieval cooking, has a nice post up about the way in which parts of the left try to claim that Adam Smith said things that support their ideas, such as progressive tax. Friedman shows what a misleading thing this is to say. I suppose it can be seen as a sort of backhanded compliment that socialists, or Big Government types generally, should feel a need to try and claim that Smith was “one of them”, despite his being renowned for support for free trade and limited government.
Here is something I wrote by way of a critique of an article on Smith in the American Conservative; here is also something I wrote a while back on some books on the great man, such as by James Buchan and PJ O’Rourke.
Earlier in the week I was visiting family in the old family home, the nearest railway station to which is Egham. And just outside Egham Station, I spotted this rather remarkable sign, erected (I presume) by the local council, Runnymede.
It seems that Lucinda Campbell Jackson of St Cuthbert’s School (see the verbiage top right) did a really quite witty piece of art, on the theme of CCTV surveillance. But the odd bit is Runnymede Council (see the verbiage top left) – and yes that is Runnymede of Magna Carta fame – thinking that using this bit of school art on an official sign is a good way to publicise the fact that everything you do in public in Egham is being recorded on video.
For me, what this illustrates is that all those who still oppose public video surveillance in all public places in Britain (personally I am still rather undecided) have comprehensively lost this argument, insofar as it ever was an argument in the first place. These local councillors know their business. They know that, if there was any serious public opposition to ubiquitous CCTV surveillance, it would not be in their interests to make public jokes about it. As it is, they are extremely keen to advertise their enthusiasm for CCTV surveillance with a bit of humour, knowing that many will laugh, but that very few will grumble, still less complain out loud.
I mean, if you have nothing to hide, you obviously have nothing to fear. Right? Except looking badly dressed.
For those of you who did not watch it, or possibly for some of those who did but are not familiar with the issues, Elon has just blown the launch industry as we know it to smithereens.
Falcon Heavy is bigger than I thought. It is 53 metric tons to LEO, for about $100M per launch. Elon expects to fire off 10 Heavy’s and 10 F9’s per year from Cape Canaveral by mid decade, but can hold the price per pound on an FH to $1000/pound at as low a rate as 4 FH/year. They will be launching twice the payload for one third the cost of the largest commercial rockets presently available (the Delta 4 for example).
SpaceX is currently producing 50-60 Merlin engines per year, which is more than all other engines built in the US per year; when they are flying the new rocket they will be producing 400 of a more capabile Merlin 1d per year, which will be more than all other engines produced on the planet.
The rocket is designed to exceed all current NASA standards for man-rating, with 40% margin above expected flight loads. They will have the capability to launch a Dragon capsule on a lunar loop mission with a single FH. The Dragon capsule will be deep space capable so they are a long way towards taking over the exploration of space from the fossil-space industry.
The first launch will occur perhaps in 2013 (I had trouble hearing him) with no customer satellite, although someone might come forward later to take a cut rate flight.
These are heady and exciting times we live in.
Debate about George Soros has got bogged down.
Did he willingly help the Nazis deport Jews to their deaths, and plunder their property? Did he, even decades later, describe this as the most happy year of his life, fleeing only when he feared that the Nazis would discover that he himself was a Jew? Or did he have no choice, acting in the way he did simply out of a desire to save his own life?
How much did the parents of George Soros despise religious Jews? Did his father really support world government, and pass on this belief system to his son? Or was he just a man who enjoyed made up languages? Did his mother, in spite of being a Jew herself, really hate Jews? Or was it just a mild distaste? Does George Soros today fund groups, including groups in the Middle East, that want to wipe Israel from the map, out of hatred for Jews? Or, perhaps, out of hatred for any nation or individual that wishes to be fundamentally different – not part of a standardized world order? Or is Mr Soros simply ignorant of the true nature of the groups he funds?
Does George Soros fund – directly and via the Tides Foundation – groups in the United States that employ Marxists because he shares their desire to impose totalitarianism upon the world (making a mockery of his supposed anti totalitarian stand in Eastern Europe in past years)? Or because (again) he simply does not know the true nature of the groups he funds?
My own opinion is that the above is simply unknowable.
One can not get into the mind of George Soros to know whether he really knows that he funds anti-Israel groups, and far left groups. And one can not prove one way or the other whether he knows that many of the Marxists he funds, via the Soros money that goes to the groups they work for, are in “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” alliance with Islamist groups.
Mr Soros may simply be an old man totally unaware of, for example, the irony of his “Open Society Foundation” in the United States being controlled by a far left ex high officer of the SDS – someone who would be no friend of Karl Popper. For Soros to fund enemies of the Open Society in the name of the Open Society may simply be the result of a man whose brain is decaying with age – and who is getting a lot of bad counsel from evil advisers.
However, the written and spoken opinions of George Soros can be known.
Mr Soros may not be a good writer (I am not good writer either), but at least his works are fairly clear on his central claim. Pick one book at random, and the central political point is the same in each of the works that deal with policy. And his works have been stating the same central point – the same central lie – since at least the 1990s, so it cannot be a case of senility. If you wish me to pick out a single work, I suggest you look at the Open Society: The Crises of Global Capitalism. Remember that the first edition was published in the 1990s – long before any supposed senility can possibly have been a factor.
So what is the central lie told by George Soros?
It is his claim that “Market Fundamentalism” dominated the Western world in the 1990s, and in the 2000s. A fanatical laissez faire gripped the West, with government reduced to unimportance.
This is simply not true. → Continue reading: George Soros’ Big Lie – “Market Fundamentalism”
SpaceX is announcing today that they will be building the next larger vehicle after the Falcon 9, a Falcon Heavy with a lift of about 32 metric tons to low orbit and the ability to put most commercial communications sats into geosynchronous orbit. This puts them into the lift capacity range of the current top end Delta, Atlas and Ariane vehicles and at a price of $96M will have a rather significant impact on the current marketplace.
I have heard unsubstantiated rumors (I have not had time to dig further yet) that SpaceX may already have a customer signed up. We will all know shortly as the official press conference will be streamed live at 11:20am Eastern Time.
This comes hot on the heels of one of the most incompetent reports (from Aerospace Corp) to hit the aerospace sector in a long time. The report claims that private commercial space will be more expensive than government programs and does so by using a model that is so divorced from reality that one wonders what they were smoking and where you can buy some.
Note: The Aerospace report is demolished here if you are interested.
ED: The Aerospace document seems to have been pulled. If anyone can find it again, the title is: “The Financial Feasibility and a Reliability Based Acquisition Approach for Commercial Crew – Presentation to Administrator Bolden”, John Skratt, The Aerospace Corporation. Perhaps it became too much of an embarrassment…
ED: I have a copy of the Aerospace document for you now.
“Education of judges, government officials, law professors, and journalists could dissolve antitrust. Understanding the nature of antitrust and its lack of factual foundation undermines its appeal. Education about antitrust history not generally known but not difficult to understand might make a difference. History shows that the breakup of Standard Oil accomplished nothing. It was `part of a moral conflict’. It was like preaching against sin without defining it. Corporate consolidation need not be feared. No amount of magic `market power’ can force buyers to buy. For anyone interested in developing intelligent public policy, these ideas are not difficult to absorb.
Should Microsoft be allowed to add a media player? Should GE be allowed to acquire Honeywell? Should IBM be broken up? Antitrust supplies a vocabulary to discuss these questions but does not provide answers, no matter how much help is obtained by economic theory. Antitrust judgements are subjective choices of the judge about public policy. Law students should be taught that antitrust is not law enforcement. Journalists and opinion makers should be encouraged to ask themselves, `Do we really need to fear that some greedy capitalist will monopolize sardine snacks or mashed fruits and vegetables?’ The public should be told what is going on, that antitrust decisions are political decisions misleadingly portrayed as law and economics. Those in a position to do so should force more discussion of such questions as, `Can salaried government officials in Washington make better decisions about how many distributors of office supplies there should be in, say, Wheeling, West Virginia, than people whose capital is at stake?’ Although today’s antitrust community is alive and well, antitrust is atrophying. It is becoming a relic, an anachronism, the irrelevant debris of past political demagoguery. Education in the antitrust facts of life could accelerate the process.”
The Antitrust Religion, Edwin S. Rockefeller, page 103.
Well, as we can see in the case of Google, the antitrust movement still has legs today.
Like a lot of libertarians who had to put up with abuse from his more “purist” minded fellows for my support for the overthrow of Saddam’s regime in Iraq, I had second, third and even fourth thoughts about the whole venture. And my views on the situation are still not really settled eight years on from the start of full combat operations in 2003, and so I am still trying to reach a conclusion.
With that sort of thought in mind, a few days ago I got hold of Douglas Feith’s War and Decision, a book by a former senior Bush administration policy man at the very centre of things. Feith’s book contains absolute dynamite: links between Saddam’s regime and various terrorist groups (established as a clear fact) including al-Quaeda, and also a fair, but in its way devastating critique of the politicking, deviousness and general uselessness of the CIA. And after reading this book it occurs to me, rather like it did to writers such as Mark Steyn, that the CIA had become riddled with bureaucratic do-nothingism around the time of 9/11. There is a very good case for shutting the CIA down and rethinking how to handle such issues from a clean sheet of paper.
The book is also fatal to the reputation and judgement of Colin Powell, former Secretary of State. It also rehabilitates that of Donald Rumsfeld in certain respects, while not sparing criticism where it is due. And the book certainly does fess up to the administration’s failure to predict the scale of the insurgency, although Feith argues that one major error – encouraged by the CIA and the likes of Paul Bremer – was not moving fast enough to get Iraqis, both “external” and internal, into the government of Iraq post-invasion. By acting as an “occupier”, Feith says, the US gave opponents valuable propaganda. He’s got a good a point: consider that one of the smart moves by Churchill et al in 1944 was to get the Free French involved in the invasion of Normandy and subsequent entry into Paris. Getting the Iraqis to have “ownership” of the liberation of that tormented country would have been a smart move. It never really happened. And part of the reason for that was an almost pathological distrust of expat Iraqis by Powell, the CIA and other anti-neocons. This is fascinating stuff I had not really been aware of before. Another big error is over the whole issue of weapons of mass destruction: Feith argues that Bush and others gave needless ammuntion to fairweather hawks by arguing that Saddam had large stockpiles of X or Y; rather, the problem was Saddam’s capacity and clearly proven willingness to produce such weapons and use them that was the core of the problem. The 1990s-era sanctions were fast eroding by the turn of the last century; given a few years, it is highly likely that Saddam would be able to re-start his WMD programmes and use such weapons to deter any regime from trying to make him behave, in much the same way that Iran is now dangerously close to the point where it can support terror groups with impunity.
Through it all, the central issues that remains – in terms of foreign policy and defence – is George W Bush’s “pre-emption” policy. And it is well to remember that as far as Feith and other wonks were concerned, this was not about spreading democracy at “the point of a gun”, or about some dastardly neocon project to completely reshape the Islamic world. Rather, it was about a more specific objective, and one which, in my view, is fully consistent with the libertarian principle that military force in self defence is justified. That objective is to throw jihadists and their state sponsors off-balance: by destroying their bases, cutting off funds, killing key operatives, etc. The more that jihadists have to hide, to run, and spend time playing defence, the less time they have to cause mischief.
It is pretty clear from the letters and information presented by Feith that terrorist groups were using Iraq as a haven, and with Saddam’s active blessing. It also nails the idea that because Saddam’s regime was, in some ways, a “secular” one, that meant he had no real incentive to support islamic terror against the West. As Feith says, this argument has been greatly overdone: there is plenty of reason to suppose that tactical, for-convenience-sake alliances between “secular” and religious groups can be as lethal as those between religious states and religious groups.
Anyway, having read the book, I can strongly recommend it. I leave with this quote, on page 523:
“But the largest benefit of success is avoiding the horrific costs of failure. Preventing calamities is one of the most important and least appreciated functions of government. When an evil is averted – perhaps as a result of insight, intensive effort and administrative skill – the result is that nothing happens. It is easy, after the fact, for critics to ignore or deprecate the accomplishment. Political opponents may scoff at the effort as unnecessary, citing the absence of disaster as proof that the problem could not have been very serious to begin with. After the Cold War, some commentators argued that the West’s victory was no big deal because the Soviet Union’s demise proved that the communist empire wasn’t much of a power after all. Likewise, because the United States has not suffered a large-scale terrorist attack since 9/11, some commentators have belittled the challenge of jihadist terrorism as overblown and ridiculed the description of it as “war”. And since Saddam has been overthrown, there are critics who speak dismissively of the danger he posed.”
Koran burnings predictably lead to murders.
So what. Free speech kills, we knew that. The lack of it kills more. Blame the murders on the murderers.
It should be allowed, but is it, or can it be, right to burn the Koran? In general I have contempt for those who deliberately insult what another holds dear. The fact that I uphold the right to say anything should strengthen, not weaken, my willingness to judge what is said. I despise Pastor Jones. I despise the members of Al-Muhajiroun whose insults to dead soldiers gave birth to the English Defence League.
However now that Jones has burned his Koran, and it has led to murders by Muslim fanatics as he must have known it would, I now see an argument that further murders will be made less likely by further burnings. If they keep happening it will have a desensitising effect.
Yet I still think burning someone’s holy symbol is a contemptible act. To hurt a group (and hurt feelings are a form of hurt) because some of its members are bad people is just another instance of the collectivist error. I would not do it. I suppose what I am saying is that given that it will happen somewhere in the world fairly regularly, this fact should be publicised. Eventually the mobs will get tired of assembling yet again.
First off, they really are. Running around like headless chickens in Whitehall, I mean. I have photographic evidence! Click on this link to the 10 Downing Street website and it shows a headless person running, or at least walking fairly fast, down Whitehall.
At least we now know the person who thought up this proposal. Not that I want to mock the Headless Apparation’s disability, but this is not a conception that can have originated in an actual brain. This one came out of the sacral ganglia in the spinal column, in the manner of the stegosaurus.
PM welcomes scheme to help graduates start businesses.
Entrepreneur First, a new programme to encourage entrepreneurship has been launched today, with recruitment of the first intake due to start this year.
Launched on the same day as a series of measures to help enterpreneurs, Entrepreneur First will be a two-year programme, through which graduates with the most promising business ideas will get the opportunity to start their business, with the support of corporate mentoring, business training and networking.
After the two years, participants will have the option to continue building their own business or apply to graduate recruitment schemes in some of the sponsoring companies.
OK. There are worse things to spend government money on. For instance… on second thoughts, I will postpone that rant until I have a spare decade. There are many worse things, but let me count the ways in which this one is misguided.
One, it is only for graduates. Because having uncredentialled people starting their own businesses never works.
Two, it is a two year programme of intensive, expensive help (“corporate mentoring” does not come cheap) to a select few already-privileged individuals – when the length and breadth of Britain the shabby little shops and grotty corrugated-roofed offices on industrial estates that actually provide the jobs are closing. It’s behind a paywall, but today’s Times magazine has an article by Sathnam Sanghera who spent a shift or two working in a corner shop he had passed hundreds of times. The featured quote was “By 8.30am the takings amount to £45, which means the three of us were up at 4am for the sake of making some £9.” Sure, declining sales of newspapers are not the government’s fault – but the hours of official paperwork that shopowners have to do in their so-called spare time is.
Three, that get-out clause after two years. Even I, possessed of the entrepreneurial spirit of a sessile mollusc, can tell that having the option after two years to apply for graduate recruitment in the sponsoring companies is not the spirit that makes a business great. Possibly it is great for the sponsoring companies, though.
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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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