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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There are altogether far too many people in the world with far too much time on their hands and not nearly enough genuine trauma in their lives to occupy them. That, in a nutshell, is what lies at the root of so many of our problems.
First it was narcotics, then guns, then tobacco, then fast-food and now it looks like we are witnessing the opening salvoes of the War on Sugar:
The World Health Organization has accused big business interests in the United States of trying to influence a new report on the dangers of consuming too much sugar.
Fresh guidelines to be published by the organisation on Wednesday will stress that sugar should form no more than 10% of a person’s diet.
What a perfect set up! The ‘honest’, ‘caring’, ‘selfless’ professionals of the WHO pitted against the obesity-spreading, profit-obsessed vested interests of the corporate suger industry. I can just see the latest anti-globo protest banner now: ‘SUGAR IS WORSE THAN RICIN’.
Well, let me nail my colours to the mast right here and now and say that I stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the corporate neo-sugar mongers on this one. Since I am usually to be found agitating vigourously on behalf of the productive profit-seekers of this world, I am hardly in any mood to abandon them now, especially when they’re genuinely fighting a good fight and probably telling the truth.
And let no-one be fooled by the use of the innocuous word ‘guidelines’. As if these things are merely helpful suggestions. We all should know by now that these directives are only ‘advisory’ until such time as they are successfully enacted into state law. The anti-tobacco injunctions used to be just ‘guidelines’ as well.
“I don’t think this is a very wise strategy by the industry, because the evidence is so strong and the great public believes this message,” said Dr Puska.
Methinks Dr.Puska protests too loudly. Does he really expect us to believe that he gets millions of plaintiff letters from people all over the world saying, “Please rescue us from the capricious tyrrany of sugar, Dr.Puska”?
I don’t buy any of it any more than I bought into the ‘global warming’ hoax which, incidentally, appears to have set the methodological template for all future junk science scares. Nor am I the slightest bit interested in entering any debate as to the merits (or otherwise) of consuming sugar because I simply don’t give a damn. I speak as somebody who has a fair shot at getting a job as Danny De Vito’s body-double but I’ll be damned to the deepest pit of perdition if I am going to sit back and allow some otherwise-unemployable tranzi penpusher tell me what I can or can’t sprinkle on my breakfast cereal.
Never mind Saddam, or Al-Qaeda or gangs of shadowy, homicidal Islamofascists, when are we going to start a War on Busybodies?
Want to know quite what I find so laughable about this story?
Gordon Brown has ordered another inquiry into the funding of the National Health Service, which is expected to lead to a further injection of billions of pounds next year.
In a move that could also pave the way for a further increase in national insurance payments before the next general election, the Chancellor has asked Derek Wanless, the former chief executive of NatWest, to study whether the NHS needs more money on top of the £40bn allocation over five years announced last year.
The answer lies in the way that Gordon Brown has ordered an ‘inquiry’ into NHS funding in order to provide a patina of scientific, objective justification for the tax increases that he has clearly already made up his mind on.
And would you like to hear something even funnier? Well, just wait until the ‘opposition’ (chortle, snigger) Conservatives launch a fierce attack on the government for not spending enough on the NHS. Won’t that be a scream?
Yes, yes I know, it’s not really funny and I shouldn’t laugh. But, honestly, I just don’t know what else to do.
The folk at the U.S. techie magazine Wired have been celebrating 10 years of existence. On the whole I have enjoyed reading that publication, notwithstanding its occasional teenage-like cockiness, obsession with fashion and suchlike. On the whole I regard their particular northern Californian brand of breezy optimism to be a tonic compared to a lot of doom and gloom stuff that comes our way. They are also consistent defenders of privacy and exude a pretty strong libertarian cultural vibe, though many of their authors could not be classed as out and out libertarians.
In the April edition, Wired got two authors, Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall to write about the need for the U.S. government to launch a $100 billion venture on getting the country linked up to hydrogen power in order to wean Americans off their addiction to oil. A lot of reasons are given, many of them pretty obvious, such as reducing reliance on oil from the instable Middle East and reducing carbon dioxide emissions because of the so-called Greenhouse effect.
Their article contains a lot of impressive facts and figures as well as calls to embark on a hydrogen project with the same fervour that JFK asked Americans to put a man on the Moon. But that is my problem with this article, as it applies just as much to Britain as it does to the U.S.A. Surely, do we really want vast amounts of taxpayers’ money spent encouraging big energy firms to move into this technology, when that is bound to provide endless opportunities for pork-barrel politics, and the like? And while it was a magnificent achievement, putting men on the Moon came at a vast cost and the bloated bureacracy of NASA is surely a warning of what can happen with such projects, as Rand Simberg has pointed out many times before.
Ultimately, if the price of oil rises to a level which means sharp entrepreneurs think hydrogen-powered energy solutions make sense, it will happen. After all, the oil industry got started in the late 19th century without a vast government-led project. The best thing governments can do in this area is like pretty much everywhere else – GET OUT OF THE GODDAM WAY!
There will be no ticker-tape parades for the returning heroes of Gulf War II and, given the current political and cultural climate, I suppose that is understandable. However, one would have thought that Mr.Blair might at least see the benefit of a suitably discreet pause before publicly shafting them:
Tony Blair is prepared to radically scale down the Royal Irish Regiment as part of his proposals to persuade the IRA to destroy all its weapons and halt all paramilitary operations, army and political sources claimed yesterday.
So it appears as if the Royal Irish Regiment, whose members fought with such gallantry and tenacity in the Battle for Basra as far back as…ooh, let’s see…a few days ago, are to be issued with a whole new set of marching orders. Thanks very much, chaps, now fuck off!
The irony can surely only be desribed as breath-taking. Whilst neither Saddam’s Ba’athist thugs nor his Republican Guards could put so much as a dent in them, their very existance as a fighting unit is about to be sacrificed by a government that will stop at nothing in a (vain) attempt to appease the brooding war-dogs of Sinn Fein/IRA.
The Daily Telegraph is running an impressive scoop of documents allegedly proving that George Galloway MP was in the pay of Saddam’s regime. George Galloway has long been ridiculed as the “Member for Baghdad Central” for his defense of Iraq; now it appears that he was motivated by pure greed rather than just a love of controversy.
It is impossible for outside commentators to be absolutely certain of the authenticity of these documents. Perhaps they have been planted by British intelligence. Perhaps they were written by the Iraqi foreign office as a prepatory insurance policy, for blackmail. Perhaps there is even an innocent explanation, though I do not see how there could be.
Occam’s razor, however, suggests that George Galloway MP was corruptly attempting to change government policy towards an hostile nation from the floor of the House of Commons, that he was giving aid and comfort to the enemy for personal gain.
I believe there is a legal term for that.
There is no shortage of entrepreneurs who will assure you that the secret to business success lies in marketing. Who am I to argue? You may have a quality product but you won’t make any money from it unless you sell it. Lots of it.
That is why I have a lot of respect for the people who devise marketing strategies. Producers can and do work hard to refine their product but the money doesn’t go round nearly so well without the salesmen who tickle the fancy of potential buyers.
It is those strategies that I always find so intruiging. How do they identify the pople who might be interested in any given product and what things do they say to induce these people to actually part with their hard-earned? Oftentimes these strategies are subtle beyond subtle. Other times, though, they are screamingly obvious.
Whilst on a London Underground train coming home this evening, I noticed a poster campaign for a book by a man called Joseph Stiglitz which is called ‘Globalization and its discontents’.
Now we all know that globalization does indeed have its discontents and they are mostly be found running around places like Genoa and Seattle waving ‘Hammer & Sickle’ flags. So I was unsurprised to note the sales strapline on the poster which read something like: “Will make you angry enough to want to march”. How dreary, thought I. Here again we have yet another frothing-at-the-mouth marxoid rant designed to incite walnut-brained followers to throw incendiary devices through the window of the nearest Starbucks.
However, and interestingly enough, the book itself does not appear to live up to its firebrand sales pitch. If the Amazon editorial linked to above is anything to go by, the author actually appears to take a more (dare I say it?) nuanced approach to the entire global trade thing and he is even prepared to say good things about it:
“Those who vilify globalization too often overlook its benefits,” Stiglitz writes, explaining how globalization, along with foreign aid, has improved the living standards of millions around the world.
Okay, I shall overlook the patent admiration for ‘foreign aid’ (transnational welfare) here. I said he was nuanced, I didn’t say he was necessarily right.
But, the point is, that none of that comes across from the advertising which clearly seeks to pitch this as some sort of ‘Nihilists Handbook’ aimed at the smelly combat trousers/woolly cap brigade. Regardless of the fact that they might want their money back when they’ve read it, it is still a bit of a depressing insight for the rest of us.
After all, publishers want to make money (I assume) and advertising campaigns on the London Underground are quite expensive. The publishers (or the advertising executives) clearly take the view that there are enough of these people floating about to be considered a ‘target audience’ and hence provide them with a sufficient return on the investment.
Still, there is also a valuable lesson for anyone looking to earn some cash for themselves: get your marketing right, and there’s a healthy profit to be made in the anti-capitalism business.
Most people have heard of concepts such as ‘the rule of law’, ‘respect for the law’, perhaps even ‘a government of laws, not of men’. The idea being that ‘the law’ is a noble thing, worthy of respect, the safeguard of civilization. Even non-libertarians (who reject the idea that ‘the law’ should be the law of nonaggression) hold that the law is something stable, something that helps defend the basic institutions of society over the centuries.
How is it possible to reconcile the above with the ever changing and ever increasing statutes and regulations churned out by politicians and administrators? Far from being majestic and worthy of respect, the actual law is normally a sordid mass of commands worthy of contempt.
By what right does the state tell people to do a certain thing or not do another thing? Whether it be to not cut meat on a wood surface, or to only make cheese in a certain way, or whatever?
The normal reply (which can be traced back to John Locke and others) is that government gets its authority from ‘the people’, but even if one believes (which I do not) that the majority have the right to tell everyone how they should live their lives down to every last detail of civil interaction, it is hard to see how this fits in with the world as it is.
Even in nations with democratic governments ‘the people’ do not tend to vote on the laws. Even the elected politicians who form the ‘legislature’ in such nations do not debate or even vote on most of the laws. The vast, ever changing and ever growing web of rules and regulations that control people’s lives are mostly created by administrators elected by no one. → Continue reading: The Law
Matthew Maly writes in with a remarkable tale of malfeasance and cover-up from stretching from the Ukraine & Russia to the corridors of power in the United States
Four years ago, I alerted the US Department of Defense about $20M grossly mismanaged and/or stolen from Defense Enterprise Fund (DEF), a US-financed program to convert the former Russian producers of weapons of mass destruction (anthrax, nuclear, etc). A Department of Defense Audit proved the theft, but the guilty American managers were not even reprimanded.
When Vector Plant of Novossibirsk, the Soviet Army’s prime facility for producing militarized anthrax and smallpox spores, asked for just $1M to convert itself – DEF did not have the money. When DEF COO was purchasing his private apartment in Moscow, DEF had a million dollars to finance it.
Just recently, I caused Defense Threat Reduction Agency to lower the number former Soviet WMD scientists said to be converted by DEF to peaceful pursuits from 3370 to 1250, a 66% reduction! But the real figure is no more than 200 scientists, not a good result for a $67M program.
A more complete description is here. For the full story, please go here and then click on “DEF”.
After my letter of concern, I was immediately blacklisted for US-financed assistance jobs in the NIS which was a professional and financial catastrophe for me. I am extremely frustrated that there has been four (!) intentionally inconclusive investigations of DEF, each refusing to look into my allegations. The Pentagon admits that the money is gone and that a $67M program is dead, victim of gross mismanagement, they do not disprove my letter, but they do not remove my name from the blacklist either.
Matthew Maly
For those interested in royal genealogy, you could do worse that check out this scholarly work from a sober blogger who is destined for greater things. This chap could well be the next David Starkey.
The National Space Society invites you to join fellow space enthusiasts at the International Space Development Conference, May 23-26, 2003, in San Jose, California. Buzz Aldrin will be hosting a tour of the U.S.S. Hornet on Wednesday, May 21. For more information, visit the conference website.
I’ll be there: I hope I’ll see you too!
Blogger Sina Motallebi has been arrested by Iranian authorities for the ‘crime’ of giving interviews to Persian language radio stations outside Iran and for his blogging (in Farsi).
I suspect giving his plight as much publicity as possible may give the notoriously intemperate Iranian security services at least some motivation to play it cool if they think the spotlight of world opinion is on them.
It is a good thing we in the west have freedom of the press and internet, eh? No way would such heavy handed tactics be tolerated in somewhere like the USA, right? Right?
Early last month I did a piece over at Transport Blog about the new Rolls Royce. This car, the “Phantom”, is interesting for several reasons.
First, it costs a lot, around £250,000. That’s a lot more than a Rolls Royce has ever cost before. Who will buy such a thing?
Second, will the fact that Rolls Royce is now German-owned affect sales in the USA? I don’t know, but maybe commenters from the USA can enlighten us. Presumably the German connection will ensure that the car has fewer bits falling off it than is the case with cars made by large but still British-owned car makers. But do Americans perceive the Rolls Royce now to be a German car? Or do they still view it as British, with Germans merely helping out with the running of what remains a Great British Institution? If Americans do think it’s now German, will that matter?
Third, it may work terribly well, but is the Phantom a nice enough design to be worth all that money? I have yet to see one of these beasts myself. When I did my Transport Blog piece, I was merely noting the new Roller’s existence, a transport event in itself. Since then, I have heard Jeremy Clarkson’s somewhat critical views about what the Phantom looks like, and what driving about in one might say about you, and I suspect Clarkson is right. What he said was that the thing is just not beautiful enough. In fact, he said, it’s rather ugly. If you drive about in one, you’ll come across as, not to put too fine a point on it, a bastard. I don’t recall Clarkson’s exact words, but that is the gist that I recall.
When it comes to car aesthetics, photographs are notoriously not sufficient to answer such worries.
Some photos make the Phantom look rather small, but this could just be because the wheels are so very big. And if the Rolls is actually very big, then it could turn out to be the front that will upset me. If you follow the Rolls Royce link above, and scroll down the one of a certain Tony Gott introducing the car, you’ll see what bothers me most about this car, which is the latest version of the radiator grill. What used to look stately and classical now looks like it may be aggressive and overbearing. Rollers used to mean noblesse oblige. Well, they did until the sixties, when pop stars and drug dealers started buying them. This latest one looks more like the kind of Germanic noblesse that doesn’t give a scheisse. On the other hand this may all be effect of the photograph exaggerating the size of the radiator, and actually the Phantom is very nice.
I’ve been walking about in London now for two months since this beast was launched and have yet to spot one. Could it be that it isn’t selling very well, and that others have similar reservations to mine?
Has anyone else laid eyes on it? If so, what did you think of it?
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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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