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 just ran across the apocalyptic biblical quote:
And in those days shall men seek death and not find it and shall desire to die and death shall flea from them – Revelations 9:6
In a sudden heavenly flash of deep preternatural understanding and prognostication the true meaning of this ancient prophecy suffused my being.
We are going to capture all the suicide bombers and lock them up for life! I also inferred from it that we will soon have the nanotechnology necessary to extend life to lengths most find unimaginable. This will allow us to lock up these self-portable munitions for even longer.
In China, the State does not muck about; in the wake of scandals about the safety of various Chinese products for export, the former head of the Chinese State Food and Drug Administration, Mr. Zheng Xiaoyu has been executed for taking bribes. Zheng Xiaoyu can count himself unlucky, given the maze of corruption that is a fact of life in China. But China is very sensitive about the safety of its products at the moment, and all the more so with the Beijing Olympics not far away.
And whoever Mr Zheng’s successor is, he or she will no doubt face similar temptations and dangers. For regulation is nearly as ubiquitous as corruption in China:
Regulators said their ability to monitor food and drug purity would greatly increase by 2010, when they enhanced their ability to respond to accidents and establish a national product recall system.
The authorities said inspectors would start shifting posts more often to prevent corruption, and that they would inspect a wider range of goods more frequently to ferret out fakes.
But they acknowledged that they face challenges in eliminating unsafe products. China has about 200 million farms, many of them less than an acre in size. It has nearly 450,000 food processing companies, nearly 80 percent with 10 employees or fewer, said Lin Wei, a senior official at the General Administration of Quality, Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine.
“This is our national condition,” Mr. Lin said. “It is our hope that by 2010 we can reduce the number of small food workshops by 50 percent and effectively curb law breaking and counterfeiting.”
Officials acknowledge that responsibility for food and drug safety involves as many as 17 government agencies, ranging from the Ministry of Health, which sets hygienic standards, to the Public Security Bureau, which has power to investigate criminal cases.
For Chinese companies, dealing with up to 17 agencies, the temptation to take shortcuts through corruption must be overwhelming. The answer for China must surely lie in a simplified administration system, not yet another layer of red tape.
Great piece today in the Times (of London) asking why businesses are not more vigorous in defending themselves and why they do not demand that people, as individuals, stop looking to the ‘blame culture’ and demand that people take more responsibility for their actions:
So where is the business voice telling us that we the public – egged on by politicians, the media and NGOs – have got it all wrong? Where are the companies fighting back at the wilder allegations of publicity-hungry campaign groups, self-interested organisations and junk scientists? I’ll tell you where they are: they are at corporate social responsibility conferences, “engaging” with other people’s agendas.
Of course, there is nothing wrong with listening. Companies must always listen, learn and seek to improve. But this ‘engagement’ is too often a one-way street: the terms of engagement are dictated by others. The ‘corporate responsibility’ agenda in particular is dominated by anti-business campaigners. And their style is not generally to engage; it is to criticise, demand and oppose. This is understandable: NGOs, like the media and politicians, all thrive on conflict. Quiet and constructive dialogue is rarely in their interests
Amen, brother. One quick observation from me on this is that the litigation culture, which is still far worse in the United States, has spread to our shores; also, the general desire to blame others for our misfortune is possibly also a side-effect of the Welfare State and encouraged by the MSM.
Nice to see such forthright sanity from a major newspaper.
A quick plug for this excellent weblog of Daniel Ben-Ami, a freelance journalist who knows his economics. Daniel holds the heretical belief that material prosperity is a good thing and has debunked some of the recent nonsense about how people are made “unhappy” by material wealth. His site is definitely worth a regular visit.
The presence of Andrew O’Hagan, the novelist and columnist, remains something of a mystery to me in the Daily Telegraph. This week’s offering is a bleat about why we stingy Brits cannot get more excited about the 2012 London Olympic Games:
A wonderful Olympic Games – such as those held in Sydney – requires a vast harnessing of common belief, as well as a momentous investment of private and public sector funding. If we cannot rise to these occasions, we should not have bid for the Games. If we don’t get our collective finger out, the terrible (and unsporting) truth is that we will end up looking like a cheap little place with no quality or inspiration to offer the world, and that is sad, too sad to bear, when we are faced with such a gold-getting opportunity.
Ah, yes, we must get our “collective finger out”. We must stop moaning about the cost of these wonderful Games, put on a cheery smile, put a big hand in the wallet and pony up. Well sorry, Mr O’Hagan, that is not quite good enough. If the Games are quite as wonderful as he claims them to be, they should have had no trouble getting funding via the market. Within a few yards of the Games, there is Canary Wharf, with its huge investment banks and legions of financiers versed in the arts of financing long-term infrastructure projects. For example, if the facilities built for the Games could be used for 30 years or more, then why don’t the organisers issue 30-year bonds, rather like in the days of the 19th Century railway boom? It always makes me suspicious when some character like this says what a tremendous idea X is, but then immediately demands public funding for it, as if no one would pay for X out of their free will. And that of course is the problem; the OIympics will not be commercially viable – not if the incompetents who run it can help it.
As the late, great Milton Friedman once put it in Free To Choose, it is – I paraphrase – so much more fun spending other people’s money.
It will come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog that when I come to the USA, I use the opportunity to and do some shootin’ and visit my weapons-in-exile (such as one of which is featured on the Karl Popper book at the top of the page, although technically that particular 9mm weapon belongs to my fairer half, my otherwise identical piece is in .40 cal). Of course this trip was no exception and so I have been rescheduled my ongoing homages to the Yuengling Brewing Company until the evening and headed to one of the more remote parts of Pennsylvania to frighten the wild life and try to resurrect some rusty rifle and pistol skills.
 As mere possession of a handgun is illegal, it is at times like this that just how far Britain has fallen really hits home. For all its many and variegated flaws, in the USA enough people with some attachment to liberty have managed to fight off the worst excesses of those authoritarians who favour crime victim disarmament. It is interesting that many PA Democrats are actually quite pro-gun, even though many politicos in that sinkhole called Philadelphia are quite authoritarian and anti-gun (note that NRA ratings are not all that good an indication of a politician’s true position). It is good to see that the right to self-defence and to own and shoot guns is widely respected even on the political left.
However man does not live by guns alone and the USA has many other things to offer…
Apple pie and a dawg… how American is that, eh?
Big Ice Cream, Big Bikes, Short Shorts… I must be in the USA again! Back in London tomorrow. Oh crap.
The past weekend, I spent it the way that any islander should – sailing along England’s south coast in an all-too rare weekend of good, if at times blustery, weather. A good chance to practice some rusty sailing skills and practice some navigation. When the sky is a nice cobalt blue and the sea looks inviting, it is all too easy to forget just how violent the weather around the UK coast can be. (The same applies to places like the Med; I have seen some very stormy seas around Malta, for example). I tend to take safety on boats very seriously (there are some people I would refuse to sail with on the grounds that they think horseplay and boats go together). All the more reason to salute people who volunteer to save people in distress at sea. One charity that I have a huge amount of admiration and time for is the Royal National Lifeboat Institution.
At Samizdata, we like to moan about how certain state-registered charities are being pulled into the maw of the state, and I am one of those moaners. The best way to try and keep the state’s hands off such organisations is to donate generously to charities and urge their organisers to spurn any state “initiatives”. If any charity deserves a bit of help, it is the RNLI. They seem to avoid striking certain platitudes and get on with a crucial task. Here’s to them.
One of the reasons for conspiracy theories is an assumption that people in high places always know what they are doing. When they do something that makes no sense, devious reasons are imagined by conspiracy theorists, when in fact it may be due to plain old ignorance and incompetence.
– Thomas Sowell
This thread features TimC comparing unenforced laws to fence posts without the panels.
Here is a clear example of an uninstalled panel.
A vicar who lit his pipe in a Kent police station as a protest against the smoking ban has failed in his attempt to get himself arrested.
The totalitarians typically begin each step by enforcing it against those who garner the least sympathy. Clearly a pipe smoking vicar is too sympathetic of a target this early on. Beginning with social outcasts, progressively less unpopular targets are chosen for enforcement until the ‘Why should ___ be allowed a ‘privilege’ that I am not?’ argument takes over.
And notice that in a five word headline about the vicar’s smoking protest, BBC managed to use the words “unholy”, “stunt” and “failed”.
Gaia is tommyrot in a laser-guided podule. It isn’t just wank it’s wankenstein tetrated.
– Commenter Nick M
There is a very interesting article in the Telegraph about middle class Islamic terrorism. For me the ‘money quote’ came from Ed Husain, a former member of the extremist Hizb ut-Tahir group.
Mr Husain, whose book, The Islamist, exposed the workings of Hizb ut-Tahir, is contemptuous of the idea that the latest plots were inspired by the West’s intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan. “This is just an excuse. They reject Western culture full stop, not just ‘slags in night clubs’. They would have supported the bombing of Muslims attending the cinema in Cairo in the 1950s. They do not want Muslims to enjoy social freedoms. If it was not Iraq they would cite Chechnya. Or Palestine. These are angry men. Accommodation is not an option. It has to be containment or annihilation.”
That is what makes these people so different from the IRA or ETA or any of the West’s entirely indigenous terrorists: there can be no possible meeting of the minds or compromise or middle ground to be found with the current crop of Wahhabi inspired mass murderers. It really is them or us.
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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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