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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Any regular reader of newspapers will be familiar with the phenomenon of the newspaper article which says one thing, but with a headline above it, written by someone completely different, saying something completely different. Yesterday’s Telegraph piece written by Bruno Waterfield, entitled Brussels admits defeat in EU blog wars is, I think, a good example. I read the headline and rejoiced, but then I read the article.
What Waterfield’s piece actually says is not that the EU has admitted defeat in the face of blogs, but that the EU commission does not like blogs. Blogs have enabled those who think ‘No’ to say ‘No’. Blogs are too cheap to be bought off or controlled, too easy to set up to be silenced. Blogs are bad news. Blogs have been especially bad news in Ireland, where Irish bloggers saying No lead directly to Irish voters voting No. But nowhere in Bruno Waterfield’s report did I read any suggestion that the EU commission is ready to give up in its struggle with this new media menace to its power, and just to lie back and allow people to put whatever they think up on the internet. On the contrary, this ‘secret’ report that Waterfield quotes from sounds to me not like a surrender at all, more like a declaration of war.
A question that occurred to me in some of the recent jousting on the Samizdata comment threads about Russia’s annexation of parts of Georgia was this: what other countries might get in the cross-hairs? It seems to me that there could be a real risk that Ukraine and the Baltic states like Latvia – many of which have Russian-speaking populations living among them – might “provoke” poor old put-upon Russia to send in the tanks. Questions:
What, if anything, will the NATO powers do about it?
What should such powers do?
Is the risk serious anyway?
In the late sixties and seventies I lived in DuPage county, Illinois. This was/is a county remarkable for the concentration of scientific and physical research conducted there. In addition to Argonne National Laboratories and the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, there was the largest of Bell Laboratories many facilities, the one in Naperville/Lisle, Illinois that employed about 11,000 people. That period of time was the zenith of Bell Labs legendary status. In the seventies its employees received two of the six Nobel Prizes for Physics that have been awarded to Bell Lab’s researchers.
It was with sadness and some sense of foreboding that I learned via Instapundit this morning that Bell Labs is abandoning basic research and instead “focusing on more immediately marketable areas”. I say “foreboding” for the likelihood that Alcatel-Lucent will join the chorus (if it hasn’t already) of companies demanding that tax-payers assume the sole cost of basic research ‘for the common good’. I also say it because I believe it is the inevitable consequence of a long trend of companies being taken over by accounting priorities and run for short term profits. At least as recently as the late nineties, four Bell Labs researchers were awarded two Nobel Prizes for physics, one received his for cooling and trapping atoms with laser light and, three shared one ” for the discovery and explanation of the fractional quantum Hall effect “. No, I have no clue. If you must know, look it up. Bell Labs has been my number one example that it is possible to do pure research without being part and parcel of the state.
I encourage you to read in the Wikipedia entry some of the history of Bell Labs. Perhaps some commenters can cheer me up with information about other profit motivated corporations (or individuals) engaging in pure, no application yet visible, research.
… or so they say:
As IDF came to a close, Justin Rattner, Intel’s chief technology officer, presented a keynote speech in which he explained just how close the outfit was to realizing “programmable matter.” Granted, he did confess that end products were still years away, but researchers have been looking at ways to “make an object of any imaginable shape,” where users could simply hit a print button and watch the matter “take that shape.” He also explained that the idea of programmable matter “revolves around tiny glass spheres with processing power and photovoltaic for generating electricity to run the tiny circuitry.”
What I want is a shower I can step into, only it is not a shower. You just press a button that goes zxzxzxzxzxzxzxz, and ten seconds later you step out, with both you and your clothes completely clean.
The way things are going, soon they will be printing houses!
The US economist and cheerleader for the Democrats, Paul Krugman, reckons that George W. Bush is a “libertarian”. To which I would respond: “If only”.
US blogger David Bernstein is equally unimpressed:
Bush and McCain are Extreme Libertarians: So says Paul Krugman: “What we really need is a government that works, because it’s run by people who understand that sometimes government is the solution, after all. And that seems to be something undreamed of in either Mr. Bush’s or Mr. McCain’s philosophy.”
After eight years of “no child left behind,” Medicare expansion, aid to Africa for AIDS, drug warring, abstinence education, nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan, and so forth and so on, and more of the same promised by McCain, the better question is, is there any problem that Bush and McCain DON’T think government should solve?
I take those who think that the modern Republican Party is an outpost of radical libertarianism about as seriously as those who think that the Democracts are getting ready to shoot the kulaks.
Well quite.
So there are many women voters who do indeed want to vote for a women. Just as there are many black voters who want to vote for a black person. After all Senator Obama does not get 90%+ of the black vote because most of these people say to themselves “I really like Barack’s interpretation of Karl Marx via Saul Alinsky and Bill Ayers, it is much better than the interpretation of …”
I doubt that one voter in a hundred even knows that Senator Obama is a Marxist – certainly the mainstream media have not informed of this.
– Paul Marks
I do not bother to write articles attacking leftist stuff from openly leftist publications or broadcasters.
For example, it may irritate me that the BBC sneer at Sarah Palin as “close to the oil industry” when, in fact, the lady exposed corrupt links between oil and Alaska politics. And it may be annoying that the BBC sneers that Governor Palin made her speech with “her husband and children in tow”, when it did not say that Senator Obama had “his wife and children in tow” when he made his speech. But the BBC is the BBC… it is a leftist broadcaster and its job is to present a leftist view of the world – although it is irritating that people are forced to pay for the BBC.
However, the Economist is different, it claims to be a free market magazine (sorry “newspaper”) dedicated to rolling back the state – and it simply is not.
The latest example is the front cover story “Bring back the real McCain“. When one turns to the article it turns out to be yet another Economist attack on the “irresponsible” policy of John McCain – the policy of trying to keep tax rates from being increased, and even reducing some of the absurdly high tax rates presently in place. The general tone of the article was both that tax cuts for “the rich” are immoral and that, on top of this, they must be “paid for”.
Contrary to what the Economist seems to believe, it was not the reduction of top rates of tax that was the problem under President Bush – on the contrary the revenue from the top rates of tax increased. It was the wild increase in government spending that has been the problem under President Bush.
Not just the mis-management of the Iraq war, although whatever one thinks of the judgement to go into Iraq in the first place the lack of planning for an insurgency meant a lot more blood and treasure being spent in the long run than would have been spent if more troops had been sent in the first place. There has also been all the subsidies, new entitlement programs and other wild spending and, again contrary to what the Economist thinks, the “earmarks” have been very important – for often Congressmen and Senators only vote for a spending bill because of the little earmark for some special interest buried on page…
And who in the Senate has been the most important voice of opposition to all this wild spending over the last few years – for all his faults, it has been John McCain. So for the Economist to claim he is not tough enough on spending to “pay for” his desire to make taxation less heavy is absurd, anti-earmark McCain is but it does not stop there – and, as stated above, the earmarks grease the wheels for the rest of the spending.
As for the idea that higher rates of tax at the top end will mean more revenue, the basis of the Economist claim that not ending the Bush tax rate reductions will cost X vast amount of revenue, this claim does not just ignore the reality of higher revenue from the reductions in the top rates of certain taxes under Bush, it ignores what happened under both Reagan and Thatcher, and under President Kennedy, and under every government that has reduced high top rates of tax since at least the Grand Duke Leopold II of Tuscany in the 18th century. Perhaps Grand Duke Leopold is too recent for the Economist writers, but to the horror of collectivists, “tax cuts for the rich” really do “pay for themselves”.
However, there is also another factor. On the very day the Economist hit the shelves, its sister publication the Financial Times reported that yet more companies were leaving the United Kingdom because of our very high rate of Corporation Tax.
Yes, you guessed it, the American combined State and Federal Corporation Tax burden is actually worse than that of the United Kingdom. “But lots of American corporations do not pay Corporation Tax” – the ones that make losses do not pay for they have no profits to pay tax out of (hint – this is not a good thing for the corporations concerned), other companies do not pay because they are not “corporations” at all – they are privately owned companies whose owners pay income tax on their profits.
Sadly ignorant of all of the above, the Economist specifically targeted John McCain’s proposal to reduced the rate of Corporation Tax as one of his “irresponsible” policies.
John McCain is no economic genius, but has shown the ability to learn. The Economist writers show no such ability, all they can do is to trot out the moronic collectivism they were taught at school and university. I know I have said this before, but it needs saying whilst the Economist still pretends to be a “free market” publication.
Probably it is the whole world I do not understand, but I am going to stick to not grasping it a bit at a time. It seems less daunting.
How does this work? Some commentators are saying that Senator McCain picked Governor Palin as his running-mate in order to attract supporters of Senator Clinton who are cross with Senator Obama for not giving up when he was winning the Democratic nomination.
Just who is crazy here? The Clintonites who think Obama is such a middle-of-the-road disaster for failing to appeal to the activist base that they might consider voting for a party that is over the other side of the road? And having done so, I look forward to their saying is the racism of the American public not Democratic-party petulance that has kept him out of the Whitehouse. Or the super-Clintonites who say they are mad at Obama for not being a woman? Republican strategists (if they exist) who care about what the tiny number of leftist Democratic activists think, but nevertheless think Palin will attract them, despite her being of the religious right persuasion and ideologically about as far from a leftist Democratic activist as possible? Or the commentators who assert such a strategy would make sense?
Or are there really large numbers of Americans who will vote for McCain solely because Palin is female and for no other reason of policy, personality or competence dividing the candidates and their platforms? That would be crazy. Wouldn’t it?
This morning’s superstrangeness:
Ministers are being urged to stop faith schools in England selecting pupils and staff on the basis of their religion.
Accord, a new coalition of secular and religious figures, wants the government to stop state-funded schools engaging in what they say is “discrimination”.
As an atheist I find a lot of things to do with religious faith incomprehensible, so maybe I’m missing something that’s obvious to a believer, but in what way is a school with no religious requirements of pupils or teachers a “faith school”?
But if Republicans want another Reagan, they should recognize that he didn’t come from nowhere, and work on their farm team.
– Glenn Reynolds. I am not quite sure about the expression “farm team”, but I am assuming that is an Americanism. I agree with the general sentiment, for all of Reagan’s drawbacks. There is no one on the political right in the English-speaking world who comes close to the Gipper. That is a shame.
I guess the Bloomberg editor who transmitted this story in error has suffered the equivalent of being thrown into a pool of sharks, as happened to a baddie who got on the wrong side of Largo in Thunderball. There has always been a Spectre-like feel about the Bloomberg news operation, not to mention a cultish aspect, even. In their London office, there are lots of fish-tanks dotted about, presumably designed to make the staff feel calmer, but you never know what sort of beasties might lurk.
There is this wonderful story – I am not sure if it is totally accurate, though – about how an employee who fell out with a notorious Bloomberg editor, called Matt Winkler, managed to transmit headlines on the service that repeated for hours, with the words: “Winkler is a Wanker – Official”.
I just love the news business.
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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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