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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“I think we should not have put off shrinking our financial sector. The result of the bailouts is that we are maintaining credit markets based on false information and artificial prices. You may have pulled the airplane out of the dive, but you are flying with faulty instruments, and I don’t think you are going to be happy about where you wind up.”
Arnold Kling, reflecting on the financial turmoil and the missteps of policymakers. It is quite a shock to realise that the demise of Lehman etc happened almost a year ago. The ensuing 12 months have gone past very quickly.
There have been a flurry of articles in the press in recent days about the significant risk that in a decade’s time, possibly sooner, the UK will suffer from power blackouts as electricity generating stations fall out of use and as there is nothing – apart from some renewable energy sources such as windmills – to pick up the slack. The trouble for the Tories, of course, is that assuming they are in power by then, the blame for the disaster will fall on their shoulders, rather than on those of politicians who have chosen to play to the Green gallery by not giving the go-ahead to new power supplies, such as from nuclear energy. Of course, Mr Cameron’s own flirtation with the Green movement may come back to haunt him.
The problem, as I see it, as that not only do we not have a genuine market for energy in this country as the current setup is heavily regulated. Even if the industry were freed from worrying about complying with Green restrictions on CO2 production, there is still not enough of a genuine market to ensure that supplies keep up with demand. To say this is an urgent issue for any incoming administration next year is an understatement.
A question that I have is there anything that can be done to generate electricity on a smaller scale. rather than on the model that has operated for decades? I mean, could a group of firms join up to pay for a small nuke station, for example? (I am assuming that the security issues to that will not be a barrier).
Here is a new blog on the issue by the politician, Greg Clark. Meanwhile, Christopher Booker is in fine form on the same topic here.
“Mock the Week tells me something about the British I would rather not know. It commands an audience of about three million. As I watched, it occurred to me that Britain may well have three million people who would happily go along with the mob if we ever had a government that incited violence against the vulnerable.”
Nick Cohen, who loathes the alleged “comedy” programme Mock The Week as much as I do. An interesting theme, that Cohen does not explore much after raising it, is how entertainment thugs such as Frank Boyle consider it now acceptable to be extremely unpleasant about the elderly, and why this might be. Now that so many groups of humans are considered politically off-limits for jokes, only the old are left, provided they are middle class and white. Cohen muses that this trend of being vile about the old might be a sort of pent-up frustration about the rising costs of paying for an elderly population. He may have a point. But Boyle should remember that he is going to be old one day. And by the time he is in his dotage, who will remember him?
Cohen evidently loathes Mr Boyle. I rather enjoyed this piece of invective:
“Boyle is the show’s strutting cock. A gaunt, aggressive, slit-eyed Scotsman with a neurotic determination to be heard first and always, he seems to have grasped that the critics will hail him as “edgy” if he courts the porn market.”
Dearie me. Oh for the days of Dave Allen, a real comedian who understood that making people laugh is not the same as drawing blood. Well, at least I now have Family Guy to look forward to later on. Right now, Britain does not produce many funny people, in my view, with the possible exception of the cast of The Fast Show. There is a seething sort of anger and thuggery too much in evidence. I struggle sometimes to wonder where it has all come from. Explanations?
They have finally fired the ‘big gun’ in the air. A Janes newsletter reports:
Boeing reports ABL COIL’s first in-flight firing. The Boeing Airborne Laser (ABL) team has fired the system’s primary chemical oxygen iodine laser (COIL) in flight for the first time, the company announced on 20 August. The firing, which took place at Edwards Air Force Base (AFB) on 18 August, was carried out with industry team mates Northrop Grumman (which makes the COIL), Lockheed Martin (which is responsible for the beam-control/fire-control system) and the US Missile Defense Agency (MDA)
I will have to go searching for a picture. This is seriously Buck Rogers!
I found more news here in the Boeing Press Release. The beam was fired into a calorimeter to measure it and was not sent outside the aircraft. They may attempt a missile intercept before the end of the year.
… to postulate an ideal society for which there is no precedent within the human experience, as many political theorists, including Karl Marx, have done, is very much like postulating an alternative biology without reference to the sort of biological structures that have so far proved viable.
– the late Edward Goldsmith, who, though he fitted very well the formal definition of a barking moonbat, definitely was not as mad as many say. The coherence of his approach his willingness to accept the logical consequence of ecolgism was especially troubling to Greens, who were embarrassed by the outright repudiation by one of the fathers of their church of its latterly adopted New Left values.
A few evenings ago I came across this graph. Some of you may also have seen it recently as it seems to be one of those things which is making the rounds:
The Fed and inflation.
TCSDaily
It shows inflation as we know it pretty much begins with the creation of the Fed. The buying power of a dollar slowly appreciated between the founding of the US and the start of the Fed; over the next century that value has plummeted. As we are wont to say here at Samizdata: “The State is not your friend.”
You can read more about it here.
Nokia has taken a stab at what might be possible with materials that will be available before the end of the next decade.
Phones that are foldable, do not get dirty, do not need recharging and look really neat as well may be the next step beyond the Apple iPhone.
If you have even the slightest interest in nature or biology, you will love The Encyclopedia of Life. It is an attempt to put all the world’s taxonomy data in one easily searched location. Presumably they will one day attach the full genome of each critter as well!
Oh how I wish I had this available when I was a kid. I knew just about everything that walked, crawled, slithered, swam or flew in Western Pennsylvania and was working away at the rest of the world when I was 14 or so!
Thanks to the wonders of the internet I found out via US blogger Coyote about events in Richmond upon Thames. I used to go into Richmond every Saturday with a gaggle of other eleven year old girls to shop for three hours and eventually buy a notebook with a picture of a cat on it for seventeen and a half pence. Perhaps the place has gone downhill since I knew it: now it seems that the police of Richmond are taking valuables from unlocked cars “to drive home an anti-theft message.” It’s all right, you get your valuables back. Eventually. But you have to go round to the station to do it. You know, in some circumstances, that might be troublesome.
Can anyone versed in the laws of England explain whether this is, if not theft, at least “taking without the owner’s consent”, as the charge sheets for joyriders used to say?
On the same theme, Longrider has a story about the police in Northamptonshire impounding cars if the same car with foreign plates is seen twice more than six months apart. A Mr West writes:
I live in Spain for about seven months of the year and France for the other five. My Spanish-registered car was impounded in March after two short visits to the UK within nine months of each other.
At the start of 2009, a pilot scheme called Operation Andover started in Northamptonshire, with any foreign vehicle seen just twice, more than six months apart, being impounded without warning.
Once again, Mr West got his car back, eventually. But he had to fight not to pay a fee of several hundred pounds. As he points out, an enormously common reason for a foreign registered car being seen twice in the same place a year apart might be, not the effort to evade paying UK road tax that the police seem (pretend?) to suspect, but regular visitors coming to Britain at about the same time every year.
Reykjavik, Iceland. August 2009.
Why do so many libertarians like insurance models, when they hate regulation and the precautionary state?
Insurance companies are at least as risk averse as public bureaucrats, and more minute judges of behaviour, since they have a direct interest. If we let insurance companies decide road speed limits, the man with a red flag walking in front of every motor vehicle would be back after 110 years’ retirement.
“I want simply to learn about the world and to live freely.”
– Laura Dekker
And she is indeed learning about the world… that states regard people who wish to act on their desire to be free as deeply suspicious. Get out of the Netherlands and stay on your boat, my dear, because the state clearly owns you at the moment.
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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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