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.
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Gordon Brown or David Cameron was alarmed at the possibility of their rival stealing a march in the first media fistfight between both camps. The two politicians needed to punch their green credentials at the public. Cameron’s nonsense on aircraft taxes was launched on Sunday to derision and environmentalist applause. An early headline that can be reversed if the public’s tolerance for more tax withers: a likely outcome under Brown.
How did the Chancellor respond, now that he has appropriated Bambi’s teeth prior to his seat? He promised to phase out old-style lightbulbs and subsidise home insulation:
The Chancellor promised that grants will be available to have every home insulated in the next 10 years.
He also wants to phase out wasteful old-fashioned lightbulbs by 2011 and remove ‘standby’ functions from TVs and DVD players that use electricity when left on.
The prudent Chancellor, ever unwasteful of political manure, was recycling spin from Europe and Australia.
Following measures recently adopted by the Australian government to scrap incandescent light bulbs from Australian homes within three years the Spring Summit on 9 March urged the Commission to “rapidly submit proposals” on:
* Energy savings from office and street lighting “to be adopted by 2008”, and;
* “incandescent lamps and other forms of lighting in private households by 2009”.
Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern was quoted by Reuters as saying: “We are very impressed by the Australians and before we came to the summit, we had already been in touch with them and looking at the issue.”
The old story of European projects repackaged for domestic consumption, as ignored by your mainstream media. The Chancellor was quite clear that his green policies were designed to set new regulations and taxes within a European framework, extending and affirming our regulatory state in verdant wrapping.
Jesus did not say, “I was hungry and you lobbied the government to tax others to feed me.” He said, “I was hungry and YOU fed me.”
– W. E. Messamore. Read the whole thing.
People will bet on anything these days.
My inestimable thanks to the commenter who linked to this exquisitely germane wiki in the comments section of my post below:
Sumptuary laws (from Latin sumptuariae leges) were laws that regulated and reinforced social hierarchies and morals through restrictions on clothing, food, and luxury expenditures. They were an easy way to identify social rank and privilege, and were usually used for social discrimination. This frequently meant preventing commoners from imitating the appearance of aristocrats, and sometimes also to stigmatize disfavored groups. In the Late Middle Ages sumptuary laws were instated as a way for the nobility to cap the conspicuous consumption of the up-and-coming bourgeoisie of medieval cities.
I was wrong about Cameron. He is not trying to drag us back into the 19th Century, he is making a bid for the 14th Century!! I suppose it may be to some advantage that we know exactly what is driving him and his ilk. Of even more advantage is to accept that the struggle for freedom, prosperity and progress is necessarily going to encompass some degree of class war.
Watching cricket is one of the best ways of avoiding working known to man
– Someone from the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) is worried about the impact the Cricket World Cup will have on the economy.
Since one of our readers has broached the subject… I too have just watched The Trap (a polemical on BBC2). This is an attempt at a deconstruction of individualism which uses some of the most heavy handed propaganda tricks I have seen in a very long time.
I am sure some of our other writers will jump in with extensive articles so I will just set the stage. A presenter, recognizable by their voice… and I will leave the filling in of identity as an exercise to the listener, did interviews of assorted luminaries of the anti-statist fight. He then added voice overs along with music with a very threatening low frequency bass sound and interspersed ‘artistic’ troubling images to associate them in the minds of the audience with the ‘bad ideas’ of those nasty individualist anti-state persons.
He goes after Hayek, Laing and Buchanan among others; he demonizes game theory and the ‘Prisoners Dilemma’… without ever mentioning Dawkins and how individualistic co-operation falls out of the more realistic ‘Iterated Prisoners Dilemma’.
Have at it angry commentariat! There is much raw meat ready to be ground into hamburger and seared on the barbie!
Every lover of fine aeroplanes will want to be present for the first public flight of an Avro Vulcan in fifteen years. XH558 is due to lead the Falklands Anniversary flypast over London on June 17. Test flights are to begin in April.
The Vulcan is the largest and heaviest (204,000 lbs MTOW) delta winged aircraft ever flown. Designed in the late forties and operational in the fifties it could carry a 10,000 pound nuclear weapon or 20,000 pounds of conventional bombs from the UK to targets over 1500 miles away and bomb from 60,000 feet. The aircraft only saw battle once in their long career. Between April 30th and June 2nd, 1982, four successful bombing missions were performed at a range which at the time was the longest in history: 3900 miles to the target! Needless to say, this required in-flight refuelling. Even the in-flight refuelling aircraft required refuelling!
This magnificent beast has been brought back to life by the Vulcan to the Sky Trust. The group has laboured to do what most thought impossible. They have brought what is arguably the most complex British military aircraft ever built back to flight status. They fought many battles to get to this point and I hope that worthy crew take some time off after first flight to bathe in the glory of their accomplishment.
It is notable that XH558 was retired from display flight status by the RAF due to a required strengthening of the rear lower wing spar. The MoD estimated the cost of this at 1.2M pounds sterling. The Trust did it for 80,000 pounds!
Private enterprise wins even with complex bombers it seems.
… in the Charity Commission report into how UK charities can be better harnessed to do the state’s work (dressed up as a survey of what they are already doing). It is called Stand and Deliver [pdf].
[Hat tip: Minette Marin in the Sunday Times]
As an addendum to Brian’s post on the Channel 4 documentary, The Great Global Warming Swindle, I thought I would inform anyone unaware that the programme can be viewed in full at Google videos. Brilliant – I am downloading it as I type.
(picked up from LGF)
The Conservative Party has long been regarded as having a certain nostalgic, and some would say romantic, yearning for the past. I had no idea that this included a desire to drag us all back to the 19th Century:
Harsh new taxes on air travel, including a strict personal flight “allowance”, will be unveiled by the Conservatives tomorrow as part of a plan that would penalise business travellers, holidaymakers and the tourist industry.
The proposals, to be disclosed by George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, include levying VAT or fuel duty on domestic flights for the first time as part of a radical plan to tackle global warming.
The Conservatives will also suggest – most controversially of all – rationing individuals to as little as a single short-haul flight each year; any further journeys would attract progressively higher taxes, a leaked document entitled Greener Skies suggests.
Even if this is just policy-mongering, the fact that such proposals could even be considered is per se a megaphone-warning about the true nature of the Tories and their future likely conduct.
The mobility that has been afforded to people on relatively low incomes by cheap international air travel is one of the most productive and liberating benefits of this age. By declaring war on this, Cameron and his lickspittles show themselves to be not just opportunist but also disreputable and loathsome (as is anyone who either supports them or votes for them).
As for me, I will be unaffacted. I do not intend to hang around long enough to witness the huddled masses setting sail from Southampton to seek a better life in the free world. If (God forbid) Cameron does win power in the next election, I shall utilise my air travel ‘ration’ to purchase a one-way ticket out.
Guns cause violence, like flies cause garbage
– Zink Mitchell
Mark Steyn is one of those writers on the “right” who, I suspect, are admired by the sort of folk who read this blog. He is very funny: some of his takedowns on movies and politics have got me laughing out loud. (P.J. O’Rourke remains the Emperor and tends to be less pessimistic and is more libertarian). I mostly supported Steyn’s take on the case for overthrowing Saddam – although I get the impression that he has gone rather quiet due to the mess of the subsequent Coalition occupation of that tortured country. More recently, Steyn has pushed the following thesis: Europe is headed for an Islamist takeover because Those People are, to use the late Orianna Fallaci’s charming expression, “breeding like rats”, and that in 20 years’ time, they’ll be beheading criminals in Birmingham, forcing women to cover up on the Cote’ D’Azur, and they’ll be no more boozing in the Munich Oktoberfest. We are, as Private Frazer would say in Dad’s Army, the old British sitcom, all doomed. No wonder a certain kind of American who tends to despise those “commie Europeans”, is lapping it up.
Steyn bases his thesis on demography. It is both the core but also the main weakness of his book. The problem I have with all such predictions is that the variables have a nasty habit of changing. Even a small change in the birth rate can have a huge impact on the subsequent growth rate of a population set. It is a bit like the law of compound interest. Even a small increase in cost of borrowing money or the yield on a stock can, over 10 years, make a big difference to a mutual fund or the size of your mortgage. Population growth statistics and predictions are like that. Remember the doomongering population scientist Paul Ehrlich? He bet that, by around now, the world’s population would have expanded so fast that we would be starving to death. As the late Julian L. Simon pointed out at the time, Ehrlich’s prediction was hooey. Erhlich overlooked a rather universal trait: as people get richer and no longer have to rely on big families to support parents in their dotage, birth rates fall. It seems to happen pretty much everywhere, including in those countries with very different religious and cultural traditions.
This makes me wonder a bit about whether Steyn is over-egging the point. Demographics is clearly a vital issue, not least in explaining why European growth rates might remain sluggish in the decades ahead. But I cannot help but wonder that Steyn is making the sort of bold extrapolations on population that he would be the first to mock if it was, say, the latest prediction about global warming. Conservatives like Steyn are usually skeptics about Big Predictions, so it seems a bit odd that he has taken up the demographic prediction game with such enthusiasm.
I do not think Steyn is a racist, although in a rather overheated review of his latest book, Johann Hari comes close to making that charge, although even Hari admits that Steyn makes some important points about the follies of multiculturalism and agrees that there is a serious problem with Islamic fundamentalism. But I think Hari does make the important point of questioning whether Steyn has let his own pessimism get the better of him.
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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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