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I had a strange experience last week, whilst camping on the Pembrokeshire peninsula in Wales. And no, it wasn’t the 16 hours of continuous rain on Thursday which almost flooded us out; you come to expect that kind of thing if you go camping in Wales. No, it was the strange and magnificent monastic retreat of Caldey Island.
For those who’ve never been to the Tenby area of Little England, in Wales, this is a small island just off the coast which is privately owned by a small group of Trappist monks. These Cistercian Trappists are an offshoot of the Benedictine monks, with the Cistercian monastic order being originally formed in 1098 by St. Robert of Citeaux, who thought the Benedictines were getting a bit lax and cavalier in their ways (for example, by failing to maintain a rigid vow of silence, every day, between sunset and sunrise).
And boy, are these Cistercian monks serious, even in modern times! They get up every day, at 3:15am, for a silent vigil, pray a further six times during the day, and then go to bed at 8pm. They eat no meat, except on either holy feast days, or if they’re ill, and follow vows of poverty, chastity and religious obedience. But after reading Murray N. Rothbard’s The Ethics of Liberty, the week before I packed my estate car’s roof rack with tent, wellies, and waterproofs, I was struck by the almost Rothbardesque island nature of this tiny sliver of Terra Firma. → Continue reading: The monks of Caldey Island
More drug war chaos:
A prosecution based on a huge undercover police operation in which £15 million was laundered then returned to suspected drug dealers was thrown out of court today.
In a lengthy ruling that allowed 10 defendants to walk free and left the taxpayer to foot an enormous legal bill, a judge branded the “honeypot” operation as nothing less than “state-created crime”. He said it was “massively illegal”, and, in the case of two suspects, amounted to entrapment.
That’s the Guardian. I couldn’t find anything about this at the Indy or the Telegaph, but that could just be me.
Here’s another for the Samizdata Wonders of Capitalism collection.
In her intro at the top of her blog, Natalie Solent says:
Politics, news, libertarianism, Science Fiction, religion, sewing. You got a problem, bud? I like sewing.
Me too. Not to do it mind, but when I go to Natalie, I hope to be reading about it every so often. But it’s mostly about politics, news, libertarianism, etc.
However, yesterday there was a sewing item.
Enough of politics …
Good, good.
… I have got me an overlocker.
What’s that?
It cost more than my last car but two.
No, not what did it cost? What is it?
These beasties are to proper sewing machines what the microwave oven is to a proper oven – the quote comes from Jan Saunders of Sewing for Dummies fame, and it’s true. An overlocker can’t do some things that a proper sewing machine can but it does its more limited range of tasks much faster and, once you have one, the change in the relative cost in effort of each action inevitably changes the whole style of cuisine, sorry, sewing. For benighted readers who do not know what an overlocker is, take off your T-shirts. Yes, very nice. Now turn the T inside out and look at the seams. They were sewn, bound and cut in one operation by an overlocker. The fluffy, softer thread used is distinctive, and overlockers are better at not distorting stretchy fabrics than an ordinary sewing machine is. In the opposite direction, they are also better at not puckering up thin, fray-prone “brittle” fabrics. I have already had the guts to make a child’s dressing-up cloak from some ridiculous shiny stuff that I had kept for years waiting for the day when I got my Black Belt.
This is the …
… Janome MyLock 644D for the hordes of sewing-geeks who infest this blog like swarming locusts.
Yes, we have swarms of those too, because we have swarms of everything. But for the benefit of the more typical Samizdata reader, Mr Natalie helps out:
My husband has kindly translated sewing geek language into Engineering: the overlocker is to the ordinary sewing machine what the vertical mill is to the lathe; you can do almost anything on a lathe including vertical milling – but a mill does the job so much better.
Serious point about capitalism, excellence of, to end with: Some of you may not have understood all of what Natalie, or even Mr Natalie, says about her new Janome MyLock 644D overlocker. I think it is clear that she likes it, but I for one can’t claim to be entirely sure about all the detail of exactly why. But with capitalism, this doesn’t matter. All that is required in a free market is that the people involved directly in a deal understand what they are doing.
In particular, no politicians need get involved, or feel that they have to understand what is going on, before matters can proceed satisfactorily. Imagine how much more primitive and miserable life would be if politicians did have to understand everything and supervise everything.
Well, you don’t have to. Samizdata is full of reports about just such circumstances.
Take Cuba, a classic “The Boss has to understand everything” kind of place. Paul Marks and David Carr weren’t agreeing yesterday about what will happen next, but between them they describe what a grim and ghastly and easily understood place Cuba now is very well.
And for an example nearer to home of circumstances ever more directly supervised by the politicians and consequently ever more shambolic, look no further than this posting which I also did here only yesterday, about Britain’s ever more state controlled examination system.
Our Revered Leader Perry de Havilland has been telling us in conversation that our postings here are better than they were in the early days of this blog. I’m sure I hope so, and I believe that something similar may also apply to David Farrer over at Freedom and Whisky.
His latest posting is a particularly choice item, based on an equally choice story in the Sunday Herald, about a potential collision between ramblers in Scotland and trains in Scotland, caused by an actual collision between “Right to Roam” legislation and the decision to bring charges of Corporate Manslaughter against six of Britain’s railway ex-bosses for an earlier prang.
The railway infrastructure has been taken out of the hands of shareholders and into the safekeeping of selfless (sic) public servants. Surely this kind of mix-up shouldn’t occur. Don’t tell me that there’s something wrong with socialism! In the meantime the local council is forcing open the gates over the tracks and Network Rail is locking them up again.
The folk at Network Rail are – wisely – looking out for number one:
“If people are serious about crossing live railways, the safest way is by underpass or bridge and somebody has to fund that – and it’s not going to be the railway because it’s not our responsibility. The responsibility must either rest with councils or central government.”
Dave Fordwych, the Sunday Herald man, thinks both policies are foolishness, but David has the answer to the problem:
I think that a solution may be found if the Secretary of State for Transport, Alistair Darling, has a quiet word with the Secretary of State for Scotland who is, er, Alistair Darling.
And I thought that Rod Liddle, in his recent Spectator piece about the Kelly Affair had been joking about …
… the day that Tony Blair announced his embarrassing and botched Cabinet reshuffle, the one where people suddenly found out that they were simultaneously Secretary of State for Transport and Scotland.
David adds a personal recollection to the effect that Darling seems inclined already towards talking to himself.
Funnily enough, the only time I have ever seen Mr Darling, my own MP, was on an aeroplane flying from London to Edinburgh and, yes, he was talking to himself.
“Joined up government” is what David calls his posting. You can’t get much more joined up than this. But, it doesn’t seem to be working very well.
The third of a series of interesting although irregular ‘letters‘ from Our Man in Basra.
I promised to tell you more about the situation here. I will tell you loads when I get back. It’s absolutely fascinating, like a real time experiment in political theory. Except it’s a bugger for the people we are ‘experimenting’ with.
Basra now is effectively an anarchy, a sea of conflicting power groups. As I briefed the CO and the Bde Comd (ed. Commanding Officer and Brigade Commander), you can’t have politics without first having security, and you can’t build security through political systems. Interestingly enough they both agreed. We are trying to police Basra as if it was somewhere in England, policing by consent. That does not work after thirty five years of dictatorship and in a country where people think democracy means “the people will decide”.
The worrying comparison we now get is with Saddam Hussein (SH). After the 91 uprising Basra was far worse damaged than anything we did to it – we barely touched it. Yet in one month he had basic amenities back because he shot looters. After three months we still haven’t got reliable electricity or clean water, because we try to arrest them. Every Iraqi I have met agrees on two things, no matter what group they come from:
You must shoot more people Not imprison, not arrest, you must kill them. Otherwise they will not stop.
The other thing is they all hate SH and BP (Ba’ath Party) with a passion. Consider it from the point of view of the looters. You live in shit, your life expectancy is low, there is – at the moment – no economic activity you can improve by, and your only experience is of a gangster economy, so without influence you have no chance. So why not loot? After all, the CF (Coalition Forces) won’t shoot you. You have to really work at it to get shot by the British. If we catch you we now hand you over to the Iraqi (IZ) judicial system. Except there isn’t one yet, not really, and all the Judges are corrupt or threatened. If you’re caught you spend about two nights in jail and get released. And while you are in jail we feed you, shelter you and give you water. This is like trying to deter crime in London by banging shoplifter up for two nights in the Ritz. So the locals think we aren’t serious about crime. Result is we are losing support.
The looting is incredible – they have done 99% of the damage to this city. The only reason the electricity isn’t fully back on is because they have been ripping up the electricity cables, burning off the insulation, melting down the copper and selling it on the black market. They light fires at either end of the cable to short it out first. Occasionally they get it wrong and get electrocuted, but if you live like they do it’s a perfectly rational risk to take.
The result is that people are turning elsewhere for security, away from us. Everything hangs on security, all infrastructure, all economic activity, everything. We don’t provide it, we just physically haven’t got enough troops. (We could do it if we shot people whenever they upset us. Everyone would stop upsetting us then, and we could build all the other security forces, i.e. police and judiciary, keep them safe from intimidation and build authority. This is a statement of fact, not a policy suggestion.)
The IZ police are corrupt, frightened, incompetent or all three, so people turn elsewhere. The tribal Sheikhs never used to have very much power in Basra because, unlike the countryside, the population was so mixed up. But now only the Sheiks are willing to kill your enemies or intimidate the police etc, so people go to them for help. This is a self-generating snowball effect, so we are creating a sort of tribal mafia, although not necessarily dishonest (though many are).
In my next letter I will give you a potted description of the breakdown of Basra society. And I do mean breakdown.
Apologies for the sparse style but I have my ‘yellow brain’ on all the time. That’s like a ‘green brain’ only cooked by the heat…
Editor’s note: An account of his recent visit to Basra by the now famous Salam Pax.
Interesting news emerges from the crumbling Blair regime, of Downing Street’s education supremo, Andrew Adonis. Charged with the task of persuading Britain’s higher earning tax serfs to abandon the private education sector, to throw their children into the mind-numbing morass of the Guardian-reader dominated state “education” sector — I prefer the term “serf-provision” sector — it appears Mr Adonis is himself considering the hideous evils of going private.
In a plausibly deniable way, he’s thinking of sending his son to the fee-paying, and German government subsidised, Deutsche Schule. The words self-deluding and fraudster spring to mind. But coming from a government already boasting the services of Lord Falconer, the crony who failed to become a Labour MP because of his honest refusal to stop using private schools, and who reached the heady heights of ministerial office despite the wretched idleness of several hundred elected Labour backbenchers, it may instead reveal the often hidden mental pattern of the rest of our lords and masters.
For in their world, they are our noble shepherds, and we are their humble sheep. They lead and we follow. And do not the sheep need corrals, or comprehensives, to pen them in, to teach them how to eat grass, grow wool, and be sheared? And do not the leaders, and their offspring our future leaders, need the marble Platonic academy at the top of the hill, to teach them the ways of their glorious guardianship of our otherwise free-market wolf-infested lives? They deserve it, for all the christian sacrifices they’ve made, taking from our backs all of our painful burdens of choice and freedom, and bearing them on our behalf, as Jesus did with his cross. Does not the word “Adonis” itself mean “Lord”, in biblical Greek?
And what better an academy than a German-speaking school, to prepare the new aristocracy’s new baby aristocrats with a correct language specification for the century ahead, in an EU world based upon the magnificent Rhineland economic model? A private education subsidised by the taxpayers of Britain, who toil to pay your inflated wages, and the taxpayers of Germany, who your son will one day rule over as part of the expansive rentier establishment? Marvellous. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer hypocrite.
Fidel Castro, in a speech to the masses, has announced that he will not accept any more aid from the European Union as people connected with this organization have made critical comments about some of the policies of his regime.
Now if Fidel Castro actually keeps his word (I admit that this a dodgy assumption) his regime may soon fall.
Cuba has various sources of income. Some are not that important – for example the Castro regime’s drug dealing has long been limited by the desire to maintain plausible deniability (cocaine dealing having a negative public relations aspect in modern times – although at one time it was considered a respectable trade, and may one day be so considered again). Also there is little point for Latin American cocaine sellers to work via Cuba (when they can sell direct) – although some groups (such as the F.A.R.C. and the E.L.N. in Colombia) have an ideological interest in working with Cuba.
Other sources of finance are important, but also vulnerable. For example the cheap oil from Venezuela depends on the President there continuing to hold power. Now whilst it is true that large sections of the population continue to be part of the ‘Chavez cult’ (the President is consided a sort of God – who is to be worshipped no matter how much harm he causes his worshippers), the majority of the population are not part of the cult and the President may feel it sensible to sell oil at market prices to whoever wishes to buy it – or the President may lose power.
Then there is the nickel mining in Cuba. Nickel is a good source of money, however the mining depends on western companies and both the E.U. and Canada seem to be getting tired of encouraging private companies to operate in Cuba (considering the way these companies tend to get treated there). The belief that Castro should be supported because he is a ‘progressive’ (and also as a good way of twisting the tail of the United States) is finally slipping away. Also the fad of Cuba tourism seems to be losing its shine. Pre Castro musicians are dying off and pre Castro buildings are decaying (in spite of all the aid sent to prevent their decay).
This leaves Cuba with the income sent home by Cubans living overseas.
It is ironic that such an important source of income for Cuba (perhaps more important than tourism) is from people in the United States sending money back to their families.
A regime that depends on the population being supported by people living in the ‘great enemy’ can hardly be considered a strong one.
My guess (it can be no more than that) is that Fidel Castro will be out (or dead) within a year.
Samizdata hasn’t done all that much reporting of or commentary on the Kelly Affair and related matters, so the least we can do is nod humbly towards those who have done more, such as these persons in interesting posts like this, and this guy, David Steven. I’ve no time for more now as I am soon to be out socialising, but this piece, about Andrew Gilligan‘s track record during the Iraq War, is a classic example of the power of the blogosphere, first because the material which David Steven is analysing itself first appeared on a BBC Blog, and second, because of how good an influential this particular piece has been.
Did the BBC realise quite what a hostage to fortune it would be to allow their foreign correspondents to just say whatever they liked, and have it all up there permanently on the record? They already know that if they tamper retrospectively with more stuff, that only gets them into more trouble.
(Someone recently blogged about a case of the BBC surreptitiously adding some distancing quotes to some outrageous piece of Stalinoid nonsense which it had presented as straight fact, after a blogger had already quoted it as an example of their bias, but I can’t remember who tells this story. Helpful comment please.)
We’ve been, as I say, a bit behind the story here, but I think I can feel a feeding frenzy beginning to develop about the BBC, not unlike the one that did such serious things not so long ago to the New York Times.
I think the vital change has not been the complaining that’s long been going on here. What has changed is the American attitude. 9/11 did so many things, and one of them was to cause Americans to pay more attention not just to the big wide world out there, but also to the most influential organisations, theirs and other peoples’, that have for decades been reporting it.
And I wonder if the BBC saw that one coming on 9/12.
It would not surprise me in the least if an internal memo had been circulated around all departments of HMG reminding staff to spend at least some part of their day rummaging down the backs of sofas and armchairs and remitting all and any recovered coinage to the Treasury. I honestly think they must be getting that desperate for money.
From the UK Times (so no link):
THE home secretary wants to add a £35 surcharge to fixed penalty notices, such as parking tickets and speeding fines, to boost the state compensation fund for victims of crime, leaked cabinet papers reveal.
The controversial move, approved by Gordon Brown, the chancellor, will be seen as another Labour stealth tax.
The “victims’ surcharge” would apply to a range of misdemeanours, including motoring offences, littering, dog fouling and graffiti as well as yobbish or drunken behaviour. The extra £35 would be added to the fixed penalty.
It won’t be ‘seen’ as another ‘stealth tax, it is another bloody stealth tax and one that will, as per usual, fall almost entirely onto the shoulders of the middle-classes, the property owning, the business-running and the law-abiding. But they are precisely the people HMG wants to target because, simply, they are the people who actually have something to take. The threat to exact the ‘surcharge’ from petty criminals is pure fantasy as such people seldom pay the fines that are already imposed on them and typically do not have the means to do so.
The promise to use this money for ‘victims of crime’ is, I’m afraid, yet another howler. Just as with the Road Fund Licence (which was introduced on the promise that the collected revenue was going to go solely to road construction and maintenance) the extra revenue will quickly get swept into the general tax take where it is urgently needed to prop up the failing public sector.
However there is something apposite about calling this a ‘victims of crime’ fund because, in a way, it is chillingly accurate. The ‘victims’ being anybody in this country with something to lose and the criminals being their own government.
Only the BBC could possibly publish a full-page editorial about the 50th anniversary of Castro’s revolution in Cuba without once mentioning the word ‘communism’. Not overlooked, however, is a bit of fawning over the Beard himself:
Mr Castro, then a 26-year-old revolutionary, led about 120 fighters in a raid on the Moncada barracks – with a garrison of about 800 soldiers – on 26 July 1953.
So brave! So dashing! So bold! Our hero! (swoon).
Still there are some brief, grudging but nonetheless damning admissions:
His country has gone from being the third-richest in Latin America to one of the poorest.
Its economy now relies heavily on funds sent from Cubans abroad and on tourism.
Untold numbers of Cubans flee the island every year, trying to cross to nearby Florida – including via a truck turned into a raft this week.
Grim reading indeed but completey overshadowed, of course, by Castro’s laudable ‘humanitarian achievements’:
Cuba boasts the highest life expectancy in Latin America and one of the lowest infant mortality rates in the world.
It has one doctor per 166 people and one of the most extensive free public health systems in the world.
It also has one of the highest literacy rates in the world, with just over 95% of the population being able to read.
Makes you wonder why so many Cubans are so hell-bent on getting the flock out of Cuba. Perhaps they are all ‘extreme right-wingers’.
In any event, I wonder if those oft-touted statistics actually bear any resemblance to reality? Or are they, like Soviet grain harvesting figures, a mere device to provide Western leftists with a tool of apologia. The ‘best healthcare in the world’ schtick is now such familiar copybook mummery that it is even accepted by people who should know better. Perhaps somebody should ask those fleeing Cubans what life is really like.
I did a posting yesterday at my Education Blog about a suggestion for a more “free market” approach to Britain’s examination system. It is of course not a suggestion for a real free market, merely for a centrally licensed franchise system.
Anyway, this comment appeared today about this, which gives an excellent if anecdotal feel for the state of education in Britain now:
A friend of mine (source protection here) was asked to mark double the usual amount of scripts this year because that particular exam did not have enough markers. That’s 400 scripts in about 4 weeks.
Reasons for the lack of recruits: a) the markers are paid peanuts b) it’s just at the beginning of the summer holidays, and most teachers would rather have a rest than do even more marking c) teaching is such a depressing business to be in at the moment that many of the sparkiest – who would make competent examiners – are getting the hell out.
Exam board solutions:
This year they offered to pay schools for supply cover so that instead of teaching, examiner-teachers could spend school time marking scripts. Not surprisingly, the take-up was small.
Gossip from my anonymous friend: exam boards are considering making a deal with schools whereby if the school wants to sit that board’s exams, they’ll have to supply n teachers to mark them.
I can’t wait to see it all implode, necessitating some market solutions rather than this government-sponsored-shoe-string job.
My worry is that the “market solutions” they resort to will, like that proposed “free market” exam franchising system, not be real market solutions. The government will stay totally in command of the curriculum, and the “free market” will just be another more complicated way to pay state hirelings.
A real free market in exams would mean competing curricula, competing exams to examine mastery of said curricula, and teachers, parents, pupils and employers organising, advising and choosing at will, to suit themselves and their various ambitions and purposes. The government’s job would be to stay out of it all, while every so often making the occasional discouraging remark about how education is over-rated and that it prefers ignorance, especially for children, thereby giving the adults who are organising everything the confidence that the government would continue to stay out of everything, and thereby getting the kids all excited about it.
Dream on Brian. Which is what I am for, I suppose.
Tony Martin has no shortage of supporters. Unfortunately, he has no shortage of sworn enemies either:
Relatives of Fred Barras, the burglar shot dead by Tony Martin, last night warned that the Norfolk farmer will be murdered after his release tomorrow.
One cousin of Barras said Martin was “going to get it”, while another said a hitman would be hired if the dead teenager’s associates failed to carry out a retaliatory attack.
I do believe that threatening to murder someone is a criminal offence. Since these would-be assassins have already revealed themselves to a newspaper, identification should not be a problem and I therefore assume that the police will be rounding these people up.
Or do they only spring into action when otherwise law-abiding people ‘threaten’ to defend themselves?
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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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