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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Shane Greer reports on his attempt to get Westminster City Council to recycle business waste. It turns out that the council, while willing to collect his office’s waste, will not recycle any of that waste – and will fine him if he puts his waste in recycling facilities aimed at domestic users. That sounds awfully like punishing businesses that try to be green.
The problem with councils running recycling services is that they are inefficient and fail to innovate. They use outdated methods that are expensive, and end up recycling in the same way as British Leyland used to make Austin Minis (at a loss).
In large parts of Ireland, a recent report by Gordon Hector points out, the state has let the free market deal with refuse collection: individual customers choose from private companies and pay directly, rather than through council tax. Competition has meant that technologies and methods unknown in the UK have been deployed. Greyhound, one of Ireland’s larger waste companies, recycles 87% of the rubbish it receives (because recycling is good for its profits). The best-performing council in the UK only recycles 55% of waste; the lowest 11%.
This might not compute with environmental activists, but yet again we see that the free market is greener than state control.
– Update: On another brain-dead environmental issue, have a look what the council at Basingstoke is doing to destroy the local environment and harm taxpayers simultaneously, by pushing development into the beautiful Lodden Valley, instead of on the bod-standard land it already owns in Manydown.
“The only way that that Liverpool is going to win the [English Premier] League is if Robert Mugabe is counting the points.”
An anonymous commenter on the Guardian’s sports pages, arguably the best bits of that outfit.
Tyler Cowen, the US economics writer, ponders – in the course of responding to a column by the US leftist economist Paul Krugman – whether modern industrial development would have reached its current pitch had it been forced to deal with today’s levels of regulation. On the face of it, had the Industrial Revolution, starting in the 18th Century, had to deal with 21st century levels of state bureaucracy, health and safety rules, and the rest, we’d still be using horses and carts and there’d be no blogging. Or would there? The trouble with these kinds of assertions is that there is no counterfactual universe against which to check it. The best we can reasonably do is to look at those societies that have imposed heavy restrictions on entrepreneurship and technology, and those that have not done so, and see if there are any consistent patterns to give us an idea. I suppose one good example is what happened in China about 600 years ago, when the rulers of that nation decided they’d had enough of all that exploration business and turned inwards. Another might be the extraordinary rise of Hong Kong in the 1940s under the benign laissez faire policy of UK colonial administrator, Sir John Cowperthwaite.
The other point that Cowen and Krugman deals with is the idea that the pace of development in the field of energy and industry has slowed down. Well, up to a point. When the late Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001 was made in to a film by Stanley Kubrick, people who watched in the 1960s were led to think that travel from Earth would soon be a relatively normal event. We have not got there yet. Maybe the problem is that there are sometimes periods of history of enormous change compressed into short periods, followed by longer stretches of time when not a lot appears to happen, but actually the incremental changes are quite big. We just need to get used to this rather than become unduly depressed that we are in a holding pattern rather than moving forward.
Note: I appreciate that not everyone accepts that the Industrial Revolution “started” in the 18th Century, but from my own readings, that century is when the critical mass of scientific, technological and economic forces came together, starting in the UK. For a marvellous account of the men who helped shape that revolution, I recommend this by Jenny Uglow.
On the pace of scientific advance in the West, and how it has arguably slowed since about 1950, this Charles Murray book of a few years back is a good read and is absolutely packed with statistics. I am not a professional statistics man so I am not sure I can comment all that intelligently on the rigour of his methods, but they look pretty robust.
Take a pinch of salt, stir in speculation, and pluck figures from thin air. Simmer with press releases escaping. Voila! alarmism, without a shred of evidence, justsetting out how the future will shape itself:
Climate change could cause global conflicts as large as the two world wars but lasting for centuries unless the problem is controlled, a leading defence think tank has warned.
The Royal United Services Institute said a tenfold increase in energy research spending to around £10 billion a year would be needed if the world were to avoid the worst effects of changing temperatures.
However the group said that the response to threats posed by climate change, such as rising sea levels and migration, had so far been “slow and inadequate,” because nations had failed to prepare for the worst-case scenario.
The source of the report is Nick Mabey, a former senior member of the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, and has an unsurprising background in environmental charities, non-governmental organisations, and think-tanks. He has contributed to the economic study of global warming and its transmutation into the agitprop term, ‘climate change’. His article adops a certain tone….
Food riots in Mexico City, environmental outrage from Osama bin Laden and Russian territorial claims in the Arctic: the past year has seen climate change emerge as a serious issue across the security agenda, from the abstraction of discussions in the UN Security Council to the brutal reality of drought-driven conflict in Africa. These are just the first signs of how climate change – and our responses to it – will fundamentally change the strategic security context in the coming decades.
Climate change is already creating hard security threats, but it has no hard security solutions. Climate change is like a ticking clock: every increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere permanently alters the climate, and we can never move the hands back to reclaim the past. Even if we stopped emitting pollution tomorrow, the world is already committed to levels of climate change unseen for hundreds of thousands of years. If we fail to stop polluting, we will be committed to catastrophic and irreversible changes over the next century, which will directly displace hundreds of millions of people and critically undermine the livelihoods of billions. There is some scientific uncertainty over these impacts, but it is over when they will occur not if they will occur – unless climate change is slowed. Preventing catastrophic and runaway climate change will require a global mobilisation of effort and co-operation seldom seen in peacetime.
Not so much economics as prophecy. Uncertainty of outcome is downplayed and the effects are asserted as fact, although Mabey would be the first to see the future since Christ or Nostradamus.
I live about twenty miles from the polygamist ranch near Eldorado, Texas, and my office is about three blocks from the courthouse where the child welfare case(s) are being handled. A few observations, from up close:
The Schleicher County sheriff seems to have been in firm control of the law enforcement activities at the ranch, and there really is no federal presence or role at all. This probably has a lot to do with the lack of any kind of violence or armed stand-off, in contrast to the Branch Davidian, um, incident, where the feds disregarded the local sheriff’s advice and went in heavy.
I am perfectly willing to believe that there were all sorts of sexual abuse of teenage girls – illegal marriages, statutory (and perhaps even forcible) rape, etc. If the current allegations pan out, I think that the men involved in what amounts to a sex slavery ring should be jailed, and I am even willing to grant that the state should have the authority to take custody of children who have been subjected to this kind of abuse. For the moment, let us leave avoid the well-ploughed ground about the appropriate age of consent for sex.
That said, this case increasingly looks to me a like a serious overreach by the state, and one that practically begs us to conclude that the state was motivated to take down this community, even when doing so required it to go beyond what was necessary to ensure the welfare of the children.
(Warning: Actual statutory language and legal analysis follows below the fold) → Continue reading: More questions than answers
Granted I am somewhat indifferent to democracy, seeing it as nothing more than a tool for securing limited government (at best) or a mechanism for legitimising proxy theft (at worst), but as so many leftists make such a song and dance about the importance of democracy, it is remarkable to see people like Mexican Hugo Chavez wannabe Lopez Obrador casting it aside when he does not like the way it is headed. His supporters simply seized control of the chambers of both houses of Congress back on 10th April so that they could block government proposals to ease restrictions on private investment in the state oil industry. Obrador does not like the fact he cannot democratically get the results he wants, so he just stops debate on the subject in congress completely. Fair enough. If I was the Mexican government, I would just start ruling by edict until the democratic institutions become functional again, or failing that, just send in the riot cops with instructions to bust some heads to remove some political trespassers.
People opposed to Obrador have made a very effective advertisement likening him to sundry totalitarian thugs. However Obrador has demanded this advertisement be ordered off the air by Mexico’s federal electoral authority, indicating as well as disliking democratic processes he cannot control, he also does not believe in freedom of expression. Quelle surprise.
Well due to the magic of the internet… here it is.
Cool.
The UK government has been peddling a culture of fear since 9/11 as an excuse for ever more control over people’s lives. Strange how people in Britain managed to survive all those years of Irish terrorism without such madness. To see how successful they have been at making this psychosis a pervasive feature of British life, check this out.
The ferret is not the easiest of animals to train. A dog will do tricks for you, a parrot might talk, and there is even an Olympic discipline that centres on getting horses to walk sideways to order. But put a few ferrets on stage in a theatre, in front of a couple of thousand noisy fun-seekers, and the result is likely to be chaos.
The excellent Jim White. The article is actually about the mayoral elections. Like most elections, I frankly do not really want any of the candidates to win, although Boris Johnson, whom I have met a few times, would be entertaining. What is clear though is that eight years of Ken Livingstone is quite long enough.
But back to Mr White: I think he is being most unkind to ferrets. They never seem to get much of a break.
Apologies for the problems with the link. Now fixed.
Belatedly, I joined the craze and had a go on one of my friend’s Wii games the other weekend. Terrific stuff: I played the golf, tennis, ten-pin bowling and shooter games. Bloody marvellous. You do need to get a large-enough television to make it work; unfortunately, I don’t really want to mess up my sitting room by putting a huge plasma screen on the wall, but some of my friends seem to be less squeamish.
The main downside, I find, is that if you are playing this game and have not stretched and warmed up properly first, you can actually do a bit of damage. The next morning, when I woke up, the left side of my back was quite painful. This is what happens to a 41-year-old wealth management geek who has not spent enough time doing sport for real. Time to turn off the technology and put on the training shoes.
A link to some Wii-related injuries. I wait for the first politician to try and bleat about the “Wii menace”.
Overheard this morning on Topsail Island, North Carolina, not far from USMC Camp Lejeune…
Two Chinook helicopters flew down the coast at low level, almost directly over the beach:
Male Person on Beach: Damn I hate it when they fly right down the coast like that, it’s inconsiderate.
Female Person on Beach: Well I kinda like it, honey. That there is the sound of Freedom.
It is increasingly clear that much of the current wave of repression is occurring not in spite of the Olympics but actually because of the Olympics.
– Amnesty International which has detailed numerous arrests and the harassment of Chinese civil rights activists
Yesterday afternoon, and again this afternoon, my hopes of getting a day’s worth of stuff done in a day, and then another day’s stuff in another day, were dashed by cricket, on the television. This was no ordinary cricket. This was not, for example, English county cricket, which has just begun again, and whose first round of matches concluded today, mostly in draws made inevitable by the gloomy, drizzly English weather. I did not get to see those two test match under-achievers but county supremos, Mark Ramprakash and Graham Hick, score their inevitable opening match centuries, in front of the usual tiny smattering of chilled spectators. No, what I saw was something quite different to all that. What I saw were two games on the first two days of something called the Indian Premier League.
On the face of it, this was not cricket of any great profundity, being twenty-overs-each-way slogfests, quite lacking in the long-drawn-out subtleties of five day test cricket or four day English county cricket or Australian Sheffield Shield matches. Nevertheless the Indian Premier League is something extremely profound. It signals the emergence of India as the superpower of cricket that it now is. Everyone in cricket agrees. It’s a new era.
India is not the cricket superpower because of its players, excellent though those players are. Yes, Sachin Tendulkar will soon become the greatest run-getter in test match history, when he overtakes the West Indian Brian Lara. But Australia are still, despite the recent retirements of Warne and McGrath, what they have long been, the best international side in the world. No, what makes India special is the number of its fans. I am fond of saying that there are more cricket fans in India than there are people in Europe, and my friend and fellow Samizdatista Michael Jennings would have corrected me long ago if this was wrong. And now, these fans are starting seriously to shift the centre of gravity of cricket.
The Indian Premier League doesn’t just feature Indian players. Their plan is to make the IPL have a place in cricket much like that the of the English Premier League in soccer, namely something played by the best players in the world, and watched and followed all over the world. And now, it has started. The atmosphere I got from watching these two games on my television was of a big, big country, self-confident enough not just to offer the world a compelling sporting product but to share the glory of it all with whoever in the world has the nerve and the determination to grab it.
And it so happens that the visitors are seizing their chances, so far rather better than the locals. Perhaps the Indians are weighed down a little by the burden of what they must be telling themselves is cricket history in the making, and are taking it just that much too seriously, whereas the visitors just see it as the chance of some fun and some (in some cases a lot of) highly welcome cash. Warne and McGrath have both forced their tired old bodies to have one final outing, I notice.
In the opening game, the Kolkata Knight Riders crushed the Bangalore Royal Challengers, from whom there was alas not much of a challenge, and the result was settled long before the end of the game, as often happens in these types of games. But New Zealander Brendon McCullum nevertheless got the IPL off to a suitably headline grabbing start by making the biggest individual score ever recorded in a twenty-twenty game. And today, another rapid not out century by Australian run-machine Mike Hussey was also the difference between the two sides, as the Chennai Super Kings set an even bigger target, which the Kings XI Punjab made a decent stab at but in the end couldn’t match. The Punjab side would have got closer if their top scorer, another Australian, had hung around longer and hit some more boundaries.
No wonder the best of England’s county cricketers are envious. They can hardly wait to get involved.
There are genuine fears that cricket is not so much being played as used up, and that spectators may in due course get bored with all this vulgar slogging, and instead of turning to more refined and antique versions of cricket, may instead switch their allegiances to other sports. But good or bad, this is certainly an event, not just in the history of cricket, but, because of the emergence-of-India-as-a-superpower angle, in the very history of the world.
I chanced upon these excitements (by coincidence immediately after posting this about the IPL at my personal blog) on something called Setanta Sports 1, channel number 34 on my digital TV, which is sometimes “encrypted” (i.e. it doesn’t work), but sometimes not (i.e. it does!). Can anyone tell me what further games I might be able to watch here in England on Setanta, given that I am not a subscriber to Setanta and do not plan to be? I get very little live cricket in England to watch, unless I visit a pub. I would love to be able to watch more of this tournament in my home.
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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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