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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The next International Space Development Conference (ISDC) will be held in Dallas over the Memorial Day weekend this year. Of particular interest to all of our Space Venturers is the symposium to be held on the front of it.
Here is the press release:
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National Space Society to Host Second Annual Space Venture Finance Symposium at 2007 International Space Development Conference
Commercial space investment symposium scheduled for May 24, 2007 at the Hotel InterContinental in Dallas, Texas
WASHINGTON, March 23, 2007 – The National Space Society today announced the second annual Symposium on Space Venture Finance, to be held on Thursday, May 24, in conjunction with the 2007 International Space Development Conference (ISDC) in Dallas, Texas. Bringing together leaders in the investment and space communities, the symposium will focus on recent innovations and deals in early- and mid-stage finance within the commercial space, spaceport, satellite and space-related information technology industries. → Continue reading: Space Venture Forum at NSS Conference in May
Patrick Crozier defends Al Gore against the hypocrisy charge, in a way which I think is slightly mistaken. He compares Al Gore’s vast greenhouse gas emissions with his, Patrick Crozier’s, use of state regulated trains, which Patrick disapproves of, but still uses, unhypocritically. But I think that Patrick does not quite nail it. Gore is being somewhat hypocritical. He surely could fairly easily do more to reduce his emissions. But, those who disagree with Gore are being very unwise if they make that their central complaint about him. What matters is not the degree to which Gore is or is not personally doing what he says should be done by people generally, but whether he is right about what should be done.
I am talking here about the “we are not doing enough” way of winning – and of losing – arguments.
You win arguments in politics by saying exactly what you want and not stopping until you get it. Sometimes that means setting an impossibly high standard of improvement, because what you want is very hard to get. Tough. You want it? Say so. Never say you are entirely satisfied until you really are entirely satisfied. You do not win arguments by surrendering three quarters of your case before the argument even begins. → Continue reading: Thoughts on the “not doing enough” argument
If it were not for the fact that I saw ‘300’ on its UK opening night (i.e. last night), then this hilariously PC review would have me thrusting my hand into my pocket to whip out the price of a ticket:
It’s an ugly business: brutal, racist, homophobic – dare I say fascist? Harmless escapism indeed.
Damn those warmongering Neo-Spartans!
I am sending an email to the producers with my suggested title for a sequel – “300 II: the Persians are back and this time they’re Islamic!!” The cultural cringe alone will be worth the budget.
Behold the depths of your innermost soul
A Minotaur walking in endless despair
Mythical like a dream
Invisible like a soft breath of wind
– Bel Canto, Time without end.
I suppose I just cannot bring myself to give a damn about what is happening in the news today.
Like most ‘evil free market people’ I hold that collectivist (i.e. big government) ideas taught at schools and universities give the media a built in bias in favour of big government and against liberty. I am sometimes asked to give a specific example of what I am talking about and I will now do so.
A recent edition of Newsweek magazine attracted my attention because it had Europe at 50 in big letters on the front cover.
It turned out that the cover indicated a story about the European Economic Community – European Union (50 years old this year). This story being the normal nonsense, crediting the EU (rather than NATO) with peace in Europe, and crediting it with the economic recovery after World War II. Something that was actually achieved by the policy of deregulation, such as the scrapping of price controls, and tax reduction followed by finance minister Ludwig Erhard in Germany from 1948, and by political leaders in some other European countries.
However, it was a story in China that really interested me. New government spending increases in China were justified on the basis that they were in the spirit of “FDR’s depression busting” policies in the 1930’s which countered the “blows of the free market”.
In fact President Roosevelt’s spending schemes and regulations helped prolong the depression. And the depression was not caused by the ‘free market’ , it was caused by the boom and bust monetary policy of the Federal Reserve System.
In 1921 a previous government credit-money bubble, that of World War I, had burst, and the government of President Harding did nothing much, other than cut government spending, and the economy was well on the road to recovery within six months.
In 1929 another government credit-money bubble bust, that of the late 1920’s – caused by Governor B. Stong’s, of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, policy of trying to support the overvalued exchange rate of the British Pound by a loose credit money policy with the American Dollar.
The administration of President Hoover (contrary to the ‘did nothing’ myth) went in to overdrive – doing all the wrong things. Trying to hold up wages (in order to protect “spending power – demand”), by rigging agreements with industry, agreeing to more government spending, and agreeing eventually to a large increase in both domestic taxes and, in 1931, in the tax on imports.
The administration of President Roosevelt carried on the interventionist policies of President Hoover and, in some ways, deepened them. Thus making the depression the longest in American history.
Why do the good people at Newsweek not know any of the above? Why do they, instead, write of FDR’s “depression busting” schemes, and the “blows of the free market?
It is because of what they were taught at school and university – as simple as that.
People can not be expected to understand current events (such as the government schemes in China) if they have been taught a false view of the past.
What I only guessed to be a possibility on Tuesday night, and repeated as a guess here on Wednesday, has now been officially confirmed:
Jamaican police today confirmed that British-born Pakistan coach Bob Woolmer was murdered.
Next question, as Michael Jennings commented here yesterday, and which he also copied-and-pasted to his own blog: How about Hansie Cronje? Just to remind you of what Michael said:
I have always been very suspicious about the death of former South African captain Hansie Cronje in a plane crash in 2003. When someone as mixed up with gangsters as Cronje dies mysteriously, one tends to think the worst. I wouldn’t have thought that Woolmer was mixed up with gangsters. However, nobody would have believed it of Cronje (who had a reputation for being honest, upstanding, and God-fearing) until he was caught red handed. Secondly, perhaps the situation is that to enter the Pakistan dressing room is to be mixed up with gangsters.
I don’t think that Woolmer was mixed up with gangsters if by that is meant that he was personally involved in match fixing. More probable is that he was about to publish in a book what he had merely observed. But, who knows?
If this was a Poirot murder mystery on TV, the real killer of Woolmer would turn out to be someone entirely unconnected with cricket or with cricket betting, who killed him or who had him killed for entirely different and perhaps purely personal reasons.
But this is not Poirot on TV. This is for real, difficult though many are now finding all this to believe. Today, the entire Pakistan team was questioned and finger-printed by the Jamaican Police.
International cricket matches involving Pakistan now become more than somewhat ridiculous, and are likely to remain so for quite some time, even supposing that cricket’s administrators permit them to continue. It makes no sense at the moment to shut down the entire Cricket World Cup. What purpose would that serve? (At least Pakistan are now out of it.) Nevertheless, Ireland’s ‘surprise’ win against Pakistan on St Patrick’s day now looks more like a gift than an achievement.
England are looking well below what it would take to get very far in this competition, even if they do get past lowly Kenya tomorrow. Yesterday New Zealand thrashed Canada, and Holland were far too good for fellow minnows Scotland. Commentators will want to avoid words like “murdered” when describing such games.
Make Ken Livingston carbon neutral… stop him breathing
– Overheard at a Samizdata party the other day
Just thought I would share an extract from a letter I wrote to someone asking if I was ant-war or not:
Not all the contributors to Samizdata support the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is not an ‘editorial policy’. Some of us do and some of us do not.
I am no more anti- or pro-war than I am anti- or pro-knife. It rather depends what it is used for. There are justified wars and there are unjustified wars and in this imperfect world in which we live there are wars which are shades of both.
I am not a neo-con who supports anything the US or UK state does overseas because it is the US or UK state doing it. I spent a considerable time in Croatia and Bosnia in the 1990’s observing the war there at very close quarters indeed. That experience well and truly cured me of any residual pacifism or squeamishness about the fact there are many truly evil people in this world who need to be confronted with violence. In fact there are some people with whom the only reasonable form of interaction is to put 8 grams of copper jacketed metal through their skulls at 710 metres per second.
However I suspect that is not what you are asking me…if you want to know do I have a problem with just shrugging my shoulders at the fact a homicidal mass murdering tyrant with a history of invading neighbouring countries had controlled Iraq for two decades with some help from my tax money … well, I do have a problem with that and so I did support the drastic remedial action of ejecting Saddam by force on the basic and rather non-purist notion “the bastards are going to tax me to fund the volunteer military regardless, it might as well be used for something that actually reduces the sum total of evil in the world even though that is going to be messy as hell”.
Afghanistan on the other hand was a no-brainer: the Taliban governed state supported a direct attack on the USA, ergo the Afghan state was the one who actually initiated the war, not the USA.
Unlike many, I did not expect the aftermath in either Iraq or Afghanistan to be pretty but I did not (and still do not) see that as an excuse for giving the Ba’athists a free pass to keep gassing entire villages and feeding people they do not like into wood-chippers feet first.
Ideally the Iraqis themselves should have done for Saddam, but of course when they tried immediately after Gulf War Episode I, the wonderful George Bush senior left them hanging out to dry after having previously openly encouraged them.
So yes, I supported the war in Iraq (for rather different reasons to the US and UK govts, it must be said) because I find nothing libertarian about drowning out the screams of two decades of tortured Iraqis by holding a couple copies of Murray Rothbard’s ‘The Ethics of Liberty’ over my ears.
Who (approximately) said this?:
“Most people have no interest in liberty. The limit of their desires is a tolerable overseer.”
I ask not because I know and wish to show off, but because I do not but am curious. I found it here, and he would like to know too, but has so far had no suggestions.
AA Gill, the Scottish columnist and restaurant reviewer, has always come across in my eyes as a man who wears chips on his shoulders like military epaulettes, which for an upper middle class lad seems a bit odd. He does not like the English much, does he? Even so, read the article, as it contains some painful truths as well as some unfair bile. He makes the point that the English/British are not always great adopters of life in New York. I have been to the city many times and saw this clubby sort of behaviour a few times. We Brits do not seem to realise how rude we can strike Americans. When I read of Americans being cut short at dinner parties or insulted by Brit tourists, I cringe, even though I tell myself that I am not responsible for the behaviour of my fellow countrymen and women. I feel much the same way when I overhear some idiot in Paris or Milan refusing to speak the local language and assuming that everyone speaks English rather than French or Italian.
I would be interested to know what Jim Bennett, the Anglosphere man, makes of this sort of behavioural friction. It may be just a matter of Gill being an arsehole. But he may also have a point.
Today is ‘Budget Day’, when the UK government lays before Parliament the amount of money it needs to raise to pay for its spending. Since the days of William Pitt, Robert Peel and William Gladstone in the late 18th and 19th centuries, the length of the tax code has grown at a terrifying pace. I came across this from a firm of accountants commenting on today’s performance by Gordon Brown:
Since 1997, the UK tax code runs to more than 8,300 pages, twice as long as it was 10 years ago, and the second-highest in the world’s top 20 countries apart from India , according to the World Bank and PriceWaterhouseCoopers
(Wall Street Journal, print edition)
No wonder accountants love Gordon. There is a sort of unhealthy symbiotic relationship between the whole financial services sector and Brown’s tax morass: the finance minister increases the complexity of the tax code; the accountants make money explaining this to their clients and helping some people to avoid it where possible. This in turn creates a whole industry of people with a vested interest in complexity. A flat-tax, for example, would put a lot of these financial whizzkids out of business and force them to do something more useful instead.
At a recent discussion with City types about this, this point was made very clear to me. Assuming we have taxes at all, they should be summarised on two sides of A4 paper, tops. The cost savings to business and individuals would be enormous.
Today, Brown grabbed superficial headlines by cutting the standard tax rate to 20p from 22p and cut the rate of corporation tax to 28p from 30p. It sounds like a good step and there will be some net winners from this. Good. However, as is always the case with this sly and driven character, the details are less flattering. The removal of the 10p rate for low earners, adjustments to National Insurance and corporate capital allowances means the overall balance is neutral rather than towards a smaller state. The state will take about 45-46% of UK GDP, compared with 37% in 1997 when Ken Clarke was in Brown’s job (it is worth remembering that Clarke is regarded as a leftwing Tory, but in certain respects his record is pretty good, or at least not as bad as it might be).
Watching the House of Commons debate on Brown’s speech, several things struck me. Tory leader David Cameron was plainly rattled by Brown playing the tax-cut card – however bogus a ploy Brown’s is. It might – just might – be enough of a shock to the Tories to realise that competing over which party can push up taxes the most and not get caught might not be a smart strategy with the voters. Brown is trying to pose as a tax-cutter. How odd it is that the Labour Party is now trying to make the running in this direction. Even though it is all hooey, it is interesting to see how Brown’s gambit may pay off.
The whole point of this budget, as far as I can see, is in Brown trying to squash Cameron: stealing some of his ‘Green clothes’ while also trying to persuade middle-income voters that Labour is actually more of a tax-cutting party than the Tories.
Even if this is utter rubbish – it is – the very fact that Brown wants to create such an impression is interesting. I am increasingly coming round to the view that libertarians and free-marketeer Tories should let Cameron realise that they prefer to keep in Labour than let the Tories win on a Big Government agenda.
Yesterday, I came across this story, about the late and much lamented former England international cricketer and cricket coach for Pakistan, Bob Woolmer:
Speculations are rife about foul play being involved in Pakistan coach Bob Woolmers death. Reports indicate that some current senior Pakistan team members might have fixed both matches, against West Indies and Ireland.
It is being debated in cricketing circles that he could have been killed to cover up match-fixing by the Pakistani team. The Pakistan team would not be allowed to fly back home till the investigations are over.
And, although I never blogged about this yesterday, I did talk about this yesterday, while surrounding by Iain Dale who at least pretended to be interested, and by three young Conservative ladies who almost went to sleep with excitement. This was on DoughtyStreetTV last night, by way of mere introduction to saying how very much I had enjoyed reading this short but sweet recollection by Peter Briffa, about how Woolmer was one of his teachers at prep school. We have not, I said, heard the last of this story. I also said there would be a tax cut, although I cannot recall if I actually said it might be income tax. So, I had a pretty good night of it.
Because, the Woolmer story has now erupted from the recesses of the internet and gone global:
NEW DELHI: Pakistan cricket coach Bob Woolmer, found dead a day after Pakistan’s shock defeat at the hands of Ireland, was murdered, police have confirmed. Although the Pakistan Cricket Board has been claiming that the autopsy conducted on Woolmer was inconclusive, sources, according to Times Now, have confirmed that investigators have indeed said the coach was murdered.
In fact, the Jamaican Police is said to be already ascertaining the whereabouts of some of the Pakistan players at the time the murder could have taken place. Sources confirmed to Times Now that further questioning of Pakistan players is on the cards as well.
The confirmation comes soon after allegations by former Pakistan pacer Sarfaraz [wrong spelling – should be “Sarfraz”] Nawaz that Woolmer was murdered by the betting syndicate. The outspoken Nawaz has said that almost everybody in control of the game is involved in betting and Woolmer was perhaps about to reveal all in a book.
Since they spell Sarfraz Nawaz wrongly, I cannot help wondering if they have any other of their facts wrong, such as little details like: “police have confirmed”.
For, on the other hand, there is this, from Woolmer’s wife:
“No I don’t see any conspiracy in his death. I am aware that his death is being viewed as a suspicious death. He had nothing to do with the match fixing controversy and any such person being involved is highly unlikely. We never got any threats as far as I know.”
I await developments with extreme interest. Not least because, whatever the truth of these now very noisy rumours, they do rather put this ruckus in a somewhat different light, do they not?
As for the mere cricket, try reading this.
UPDATE: The BBC now confirms that Woolmer’s death is being treated as “suspicious”.
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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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