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’ve just killed off another comment spamming attack against Samizdata. It was clearly automated so I expect many of the rest of you are getting hit as well. The methodology is an attempt at subtlety… but it ignores the fact that a blog is actively monitored.
I suggest you all immediately ban the ip if you haven’t done so already: 80.58.11.45.
The attacker hits comments sections of old articles; the comment itself is trivial and innocuous. “nice website” “interesting post” and the like. They payload is the URL field.
This looks like a google-bash for hire scheme to me.
It took a while but the truth is no longer ‘out there’, it has landed smack dab onto the pages of the Guardian. Yes, the Guardian.
This long-overdue confirmation of the real centre-left agenda comes courtesy of David Walker who is gleeful about the viral growth of tax-consumers:
Tony – reform is my middle name – Blair isn’t obviously the public sector’s friend. Nor, for all his protestations of affection, is Gordon Brown, the man who insisted on putting the safety of London’s tube travellers in the hands of profit-maximising companies.
Yet under them the public sector prospers. Since 1999 it has just kept growing as a source of jobs; the UK’s approximation to full employment owes a lot to council, NHS and government recruitment. Paranoid rightwingers, for whom the Guardian’s thick advertising sections are a weekly torment, don’t know the half of it. Under Labour, “indirect” employment has also boomed. Yesterday John Prescott published an evaluation of his new deal for communities, a set of participative projects in run-down areas. Between the lines it noted that a sort of reserve army of tenants and activists has been recruited, subsisting of government grants.
Imagine how ‘paranoid’ those ‘rightwingers’ would get if they suspected the truth about how many people are suckling at the state teat? Why, it would be enough to drive them round the twist.
Now here come new figures for direct government employment. Whitehall is booming. During the past year, the Inland Revenue took on 8,500 extra people, at a time when total civil service numbers increased by nearly 4%. Even the tiny Department of Culture, Media and Sport, 450 strong in April last year, added 30 people to its roster.
Rejoice, rejoice, rejoice!!! Roll on the glorious day when everyone works for the state!
In theory, that ought to mean up to 6 million households -perhaps 15 million people – with a direct interest in buoyant public expenditure, and hence in having a government likely to keep it that way. Labour’s formula for permanent re-election, you might think. But turkeys will vote for Christmas.
And to think it is capitalists like me who are generally regarded as ‘self-serving’.
Not once does Mr.Walker even attempt to invoke the mendacious tropes about ‘social justice’ and ‘caring’ and while his candour cannot be regarded as admirable it is, nonetheless, refreshing. His is as bold an admission as I can imagine that the motivation behind voting Labour is to increase one’s chances of joining or staying on the government payroll. Of course, libertarians have been saying this for years and I suppose I must extend some muted thanks to Mr.Walker for publicly admitting that we were right.
But being right is one thing and prevailing is something else. In order to prevail this message must filter down to the remaining 45 million or so other British people who struggle to support themselves and carry the burden of this parasite class on their backs.
Ou readers may have noticed that the Samizdata was down for a few hours today. It appears that the cause was sustained DOS attack directed to our hosting company Hosting Matters.
Little Green Footballs was also affected and has further details.
Immigration Minister Beverley Hughes has become the latest recruit to Big Blunkett’s cause. The BBC Reports that Hughes has supported introducing compulsory National Identity Cards for innocent British citizens. She told the Home Affairs Committee that ID Cards would be a good thing because they are “the only way” to prevent illegal immigrants from working.
She is wrong for three simple reasons:
- Lack of ID Card would not stop most of the illegal immigrants who work for cash, no questions asked and no records kept.
- ID Cards would not prevent illegal immigrants – or others – supporting themselves though crime.
- Even if the Cards did work, describing them as the “only way” is pure hyperbole. There are always options.
Hughes also talked about an on-going cost benefit analysis of ID Cards. It would be interesting to know how the privacy and civil liberties issues of ID Cards are being costed. In all probability they are being ignored, making the entire analysis worthless.
I’ve emailed Ms Hughes asking that question. In the unlikely event that she replies I’ll pass it on.
Cross posted from The Chestnut Tree Cafe
The Bush administration recently has been pummeled by a quasi-scandal involving the leak of the name of a purported CIA “covert operative.” I won’t go into any details here, as I don’t think there is any “there” there. One of the responses of the Bushies was to crack down on leakers in the administration.
This new anti-leaking policy was, of course, promptly, well, leaked.
From the Philadelphia Inquirer: “Bush told his senior aides Tuesday that he ‘didn’t want to see any stories’ quoting unnamed administration officials in the media anymore, and that if he did, there would be consequences, said a senior administration official who asked that his name not be used.”
There is an excellent round up of the current nuclear threat in today’s Opinion Journal.
According to another government study, Pyongyang has also been at work on two very large “electrical generating” stations that, upon completion, will produce sufficient spent nuclear fuel to yield 200 kilograms of plutonium, enough to manufacture approximately 30 nuclear weapons a year.
It is a long article but well worth the time it takes to read it.
For a while now I’ve been noticing something called the No Child Left Behind Act, which Republicans were hugely pleased about when President Bush signed it into law as recently as January 2002, but which has now turned pear shaped, as we say in these parts, with extraordinary speed.
There’s more about No Child Left Behind today in the New York Times, because the Democrats now smell blood in the water on this.
The gist of No Child Left Behind is: (a) Education Must Be Better For Everybody, So There, but er … (b) you’ll have to pay for this compulsory improvement yourselves.
Here’s the start of the New York Times coverage today:
Congressional Republicans are nervous about a G.O.P. poll that shows them losing ground over education. But how could voters not be disappointed by the Bush administration’s mishandling of education policy generally, and especially its decision to withhold more than $6 billion from the landmark No Child Left Behind Act, the supposed centerpiece of the administration’s domestic policy?
The new law is supposed to place a qualified teacher in every classroom and wipe out the achievement gap between rich and poor children. Schools that fail to make steady progress are labeled deficient and required to provide students with costly tutoring and allow them to transfer to more successful public schools in the same district.
In some districts, more than 40 percent of the schools are called “in need of improvement.” The lack of money from Congress has licensed a backlash by states that never wanted to comply with the law anyway, especially the provision that requires ending the achievement gap between rich and poor.
This is classic statism. A bunch of people have a notion about how the world should be which they get all excited about. So, they get the government to say: that’s what must happen. Within a few years it becomes clear to all that these ‘education reformers’ would have done far, far better to have just sat on their porches, drunk liquor, and said howdy to passers-by.
The point is, the everyday language of government, so to speak, is a language of compulsion and suppression. No Child Left Behind was sold as … well, as: no child left behind! What it actually says is: you must supply “better” education, which turns out to mean education done by people with fancier exam results to their names, to everybody, and especially to poor people. If, on the other hand, you have been teaching poor people with great success for the last few years, but without fancy exam results to your name, guess what? Stop it at once you bad bad person!
No Child Left Behind – a textbook example of statism in action – has, because it is statism, made things worse.
I guess it’s all education in how the world works, but the people who need to learn their lesson are the idiots who unleashed this shambles. They need to learn how wrong they were. And it’s all part of statism that they will do anything rather than learn their lesson.
The Democrats will now make the running in this argument, but sadly, the only lesson they want anyone to learn is that More Money should be spent.
If more money is spent, that’ll be yet more education, this time in the folly of stealing money from one bunch of people and spraying it over another bunch.
As Perry de Havilland would say at this point: the state is not your friend. And that applies just as much to education as it does to anything else.
Natalie Solent links to news of this new discovery:
A team of researchers led by Dr. Daniel Kwok and Dr. Larry Kostiuk in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Alberta has discovered a new way of generating electric power from flowing water.
When a liquid such as water is passed through a small channel, a physical phenomenon called charge separation occurs. The surface of the channel becomes ionically charged and opposite-charged ions in the liquid are attracted to it.
At the same time, like-charged ions are repelled from the surface. This results in a thin liquid layer with a net charge. This region, known as the Electric Double Layer (EDL), ranges from several nanometres to a few micrometres thick.
To harness this phenomenon, the research team constructed a microchannel with a diameter similar to the EDL itself and then forced the liquid through the channel. This resulted in only one type of ion in the EDL being transported downstream, creating a current and hence a voltage difference across the ends of the channel.
An external electric circuit was constructed by placing electrodes at the ends of the channel, and electrical energy was extracted from the device as current flowed between the electrodes.
I am impressed, I think. Or I will be as soon as I am convinced that this is not just wishful thinking in techno-babble.
I am not so impressed by the Calgary Sun’s reporting of the story. They regard the “response from the international community” as being more significant than the workings of the invention itself, which is to get it the wrong way around, I think. But after they have given us a few paragraphs about all the phone-calls and e-mails that have already flown around concerning this new gadget, they too get around to describing what it does…
With the help of two graduate students, the two professors were able to light a small bulb by simply squeezing a syringe of ordinary tap water through a glass “filter” with microscopic-sized holes they call microchannels.
They invented their “electrokinetic” water battery by harnessing the natural energy that is created on a very tiny scale when a flowing liquid meets a solid surface, creating an electrical charge. Water forced through a microchannel results in the movement of positive and negatives ions in such a way that one end becomes positive and the other negative.
…and how significant it might be:
The inventors are particularly excited by the fact the electricity is produced cleanly and involves no moving parts.
The discovery could in a matter of years lead to batteries for everyday items such as cellphones and calculators being powered by pressurized water.
The Green Movement will be appalled. How can they be expected to prevent all forms of technological progress and take humanity back to the Stone Age, if even Canadians are doing stuff like this?
More seriously, is this the technology that might finally make electric cars a serious proposition?
And: what kind of water is involved here? Does it get used up by the process? Will salt water suffice? Tap water? In fifty years time will the World Economy be yanked this way and that by WPEC?
Time for the Samizdata commentariat to do their stuff.
I’ve lately been following the writing of the new kid on the Baghdad block.
Good stuff, well worth a regular read.
From our friends at the Libertarian Alliance, a very interesting article on the close historical links between fascism and socialism (or at least Marxism). It has never ceased to amaze me how many people think that fascism/nazism and socialism are somehow divided by a wide gulf.
Sure, states professing fascism and nazism went to war with a state professing to be communist/socialist, but the most bitter struggles are always internecine, and anyway how can you miss the fact that the name of the Nazi party was National Socialist?
The article should provide you with ample ammunition to make uncomfortable the many, many socialists out there who view “fascist” as the ultimate in derogation.
From 1912 to 1914, Mussolini was the Che Guevara of his day, a living saint of leftism. Handsome, courageous, charismatic, an erudite Marxist, a riveting speaker and writer, a dedicated class warrior to the core, he was the peerless duce of the Italian Left. He looked like the head of any future Italian socialist government, elected or revolutionary.
Mussolini and a group of adherents launched the Fascist movement in 1919. The initiators were mostly men of the left: revolutionary syndicalists and former Marxists.
Apart from its ardent nationalism and pro-war foreign policy, the Fascist program was a mixture of radical left, moderate left, democratic, and liberal measures.
Given what most people today think they know about Fascism, this bare recital of facts is a mystery story. How can a movement which epitomizes the extreme right be so strongly rooted in the extreme left? What was going on in the minds of dedicated socialist militants to turn them into equally dedicated Fascist militants?
What indeed? The remainder of the article, on first read, seems to be well-researched and well-thought out story of intellectual and political ferment.
James Gregor has argued that Fascism is a Marxist heresy, a claim that has to be handled with care. Marxism is a doctrine whose main tenets can be listed precisely: class struggle, historical materialism, surplus-value, nationalization of the means of production, and so forth. Nearly all of those tenets were explicitly repudiated by the founders of Fascism, and these repudiations of Marxism largely define Fascism. Yet however paradoxical it may seem, there is a close ideological relationship between Marxism and Fascism. We may compare this with the relationship between, say, Christianity and Unitarianism. Unitarianism repudiates all the distinctive tenets of Christianity, yet is still clearly an offshoot of Christianity, preserving an affinity with its parental stem.
Yes, the authoritarian acorn never falls far from the collectivist tree.
Here is an interesting bit of development work being let by the DOD which I found while reading through a list of contracts:
United Technology Corp., West Palm Beach, Fla., is being awarded a $49,405,000 indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract for research and development for the Robust Scramjet. The Air Force will issue delivery orders totaling up to the maximum amount indicated above, though actual requirements may necessitate less than this amount. At this time, $220,000 of the funds has been obligated. Further funds will be obligated as individual delivery orders are issued. This work will be complete by September 2010. Solicitation began April 2003, and negotiations were completed September 2003. The Air Force Research Laboratory, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, is the contracting activity (F33615-03-D-2418).
A SCRAMjet is a Supersonic Combustion Ram jet, an engine which is of use only for hypersonic speeds. It would needed for missiles or near-suborbital warcraft.
PS: For those not familiar with the space community, the Air Force Research Lab at Wright Patterson (AFRL-WPAFB) is where very interesting future-looking propulsion systems work is done. If you want to talk about things like antimatter engine design, these are the lads.
Much is being made, rightly, of China’s growing economic importance in the world, following China’s recent and very newsworthy space mission.
But now here’s a really interesting and encouraging New York Times article about the rapid and highly visible economic progress now being made in India. The most encouraging thing about the piece for me is that not only is this progress described, it is also explained:
This is no longer the India of Gandhi, among history’s most famous ascetics.
The change in values, habits and options in India – not just from his day, but from a mere decade ago – is undeniable, and so is the sense of optimism about India’s economic prospects.
Much of India is still mired in poverty, but just over a decade after the Indian economy began shaking off its statist shackles and opening to the outside world, it is booming. The surge is based on strong industry and agriculture, rising Indian and foreign investment and American-style consumer spending by a growing middle class, including the people under age 25 who now make up half the country’s population.
The lesson – and being taught in the New York Times, please note, rather than merely in some free market Think Tank think piece – is that if you want rapid economic progress and a sense of optimism, you have to shake off your “statist shackles” and open up to the outside world.
The use of the word “statist” I find especially interesting. I could be wrong, but I don’t believe that’s a very common usage over here, and for that matter how common is it in the USA’s mainstream media? It makes the point perfectly that the important divide now is not between different factions wanting to use state power to do this or alternatively that, but rather between all of those who want their country or state to be or to remain bound by statist shackles, and all those who want those statist shackles shaken off. (You may need to slow down a bit when you try to say things like this out loud.)
For the sake of the entire world, I hope that the Indians themselves draw this same lesson from their own emerging success, and then teach that lesson to the rest of the world. Combine them doing that with the Chinese having so visibly retreated from their own far more horrific statist mania unleashed by the lunatic Mao-Tse-Tung and as a result also emerging into economic superpower status, and the twenty first century could end up being a very good one. It already looks like being a very prosperous one.
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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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