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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A History of the American People
Paul Johnson
HarperCollins, 1998
The Myth of the Robber Barons
Burton W. Folsom, Jr.
Young American Foundation, 1991 (3rd edition 1993)
Paul Johnson’s A History of the American People is a long (814 pages + notes and index, but no separate bibliography) but extremely well-structured book, so well-sustained that it is almost a page-turner. The author is openly partisan – i.e., holding to what was, by and large, the American consensus until the end of the Eisenhower era – and he opens his history by confessing its writing to have been a labour of love. There is no nonsense about starting it any earlier than the arrival of the first English-speaking settlers in 1580. Not being able to make a comparison with any other complete history of the US, I have to judge it in absolute terms.
The book is divided into eight parts, on chronological lines; there are no separate sections for the arts, sciences, social trends, or the like; all are integrated into the narrative, as are also the personalities, thumbnail biographical sketches and moral and political judgments. A painter himself, the author has much to say about US landscape painters of whom I had never even heard; perhaps significantly, Warhol, Pollock and Lichtenstein (to name those that come to my mind) are not even mentioned. → Continue reading: American history – the long and the short of it
Here is what Sullivan says, in today’s Sunday Times:
Bin Laden offered a truce. Who offers truces? People who are losing the battle.
Just what I was thinking.
I can not find anything else along similar lines here.
Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without your accordion
– Seen used as a signature on a games forum
We agonize a lot here about Islamic fundamentalism. But what can be done about it?
There are many reasons why Islamism of the most belligerent sort now stalks the earth, but one of them is that in many parts of the world, if you want an education, your only choice now is often either an education presided over by Islamic fundamentalists, or no education at all.
It is this problem which a group of businessmen in Pakistan have set out to remedy. With financial help from people of Pakistani descent who are living it Britain, they have established The Citizens’ Foundation, and there was an article about the work of TCF in the Times Magazine yesterday by Joanna Pitman.
Quote:
The six of them – all highly successful top-level managers – met in August 1995 and began to think seriously about the problems. They addressed poverty, health, intolerance, population, education, water and sanitation, and concluded that the solution to all these issues was education. In Pakistan, education remains desperately, stupidly low on the list of government priorities. The state schooling system, riddled with corruption, has been either non-existent or on the point of collapse for many years. The result is a massive intellectual deficit: out of a total population of 145 million, the country has 28 million children entirely unschooled and 41 per cent of adult men and 70 per cent of adult women illiterate. Ironically, in some areas, the first parents queueing to send their children to TCP schools rum out to be government schoolteachers.
The six businessmen decided to set up a corporate-style charitable organisation to build and run schools offering high-quality education to both girls and boys in the poorest areas of the country. Within four months, the ground had been broken to construct the first five schools, paid for out of the pockets of the founders, and by May 1996 all five were operational. Only once the schools had been running successfully for a year did TCF begin to expand – not through advertising or asking for funds, but simply by taking people to see the reality and letting them spread the word.
Its target is to build 1,000 primary a secondary schools by 2010, which will cater for 350-400,000 children at a time, offering them a high-quality, secular education that is the envy of most government schools and comparable to the country’s elite private schools. “We want these children to compete with our own children,” says Saleem, whose four teenage children are being educated at the best Pakistani private school and at the American School.
I have been unable to locate this article either here or anywhere else (although if someone can correct that, please do), and so have taken the liberty of scanning it all into my Education Blog, where you can now read the whole thing. If you do that, you will not, I believe, regard your time as having been wasted.
This project strikes me as an example of all kinds of good things, but in particular of the benefits that can come to a poor country when people from it are able to go and live in richer countries, and are then able to do something about the depressing circumstances from which they thought at first only of escaping.
In general, I believe that if Islam ever does get past confrontation and accommodates itself amicably into humanity as a whole, the Islamic diaspora will be an important part of this process.
From the BBC last Friday:
Nearly 200 people have been wrongly accused by the Criminal Records Bureau of having criminal records.
The names of 193 people were mistakenly linked with convictions held on the police national computer (PNC), BBC Radio Five Live has learned.
In some cases the names of those being vetted by the bureau were similar or identical to those of actual criminals.
In others, the criminals had given someone else’s personal details to the authorities to avoid a police record.
The Criminal Records Bureau, which came into operation in March 2002, does background checks on those who work with children or vulnerable people.
They made this number of mistakes (that they already know of) in the criminal record list, which is only a minority of the population. How many would they make if the list contained, or was supposed to contain, everybody?
What is scary about this kind of thing is when the information-that-isn’t starts to really get around, into several different data bases at once. At that point it becomes extremely hard to eradicate. Something like a false reading on sexual perversion (which is what these background checks for working with children and vulberable people are all about) is liable to spring to life again after previously having been eradicated, supposedly. After all, you can’t be too careful, can you?
Alice Bachini has decided to bring her blogging career to an end. At least for now.
I really have got to the end of the blogging phase that started a year and a half ago when I created this blog under the old title you can still see if you look up the stats. I’ve said everything I wanted to say here, met lots of interesting people and had a huge amount of fun. And now my creativity is going into new demanding projects and as a blogger I’ve run out of anything original to say.
I am sure she has not run out of original things to say because people like Alice seldom do. However, operating a solo-blog is a demanding and time-intensive business and, if there are other things that she wants to do with her life then I can sympathise with the need to boldly prioritise.
She intimates that she might return to blogging at some point in the future and I certainly hope she does. The blogosphere, particularly the British end of it, needs all the voices of reason it can get.
As a parting gift, her final (if indeed it proves to be ‘final’) entry consists of a fulsome and righteous rant:
It’s fine to blow people up if your cause is anti-Americanism. Only capitalists should be pacifists: because that way, they will lose the war. Evil fucking hypocritical bastards. Every single one of them should go and live in a country whose values they actually support. But I suppose they don’t want to strap pretend bombs to their kids, give them machine guns and parade them in the streets.
In the traditions of good performers everywhere, she has left us all wanting more.
This could all be a tease (there have been hundreds of similar reports about a referendum on scrapping the pound for the euro).
The EU constitution in itself may not be worse than what the British version is mutating into. If adopted our choices become a pan-European libertarian movement or a secession.
The latter may not be as easy as the Confederate attempt in 1861 from the USA (less public support in the UK, more heavily outnumbered by the rest of the EU etc). Hopefully such a secession could be more Slovenian than Croatian.
The advantage of a referendum is that it cannot be worse than letting the Prime Minister decide alone.
The disadvantage is that it will only happen once the result is known in advance to suit the government, so that when they win, it can slip through the single currency without a vote (that is what the French government did with the Maastricht Treaty in 1992).
Either way spread the word: by next weekend we could have a live campaign on our hands.
How could I possibly pass up the opportunity to gloat over this one?
Will Hutton, Britain’s foremost critic of capitalism and an outspoken advocate for affordable social housing, is married to a property developer who has made a fortune out of selling and renting inner-city properties, often at rates which local council housing officers describe as exorbitant.
No, you don’t get it. Will Hutton is a foremost critic of capitalism for people other than Will Hutton.
Mr Hutton’s wife heads a company called First Premise, which owns and manages dozens of commercial and residential properties in London.
The company specialises in renovating rundown properties – often with the help of public grants – and then makes a profit by selling or renting them out.
The disclosure that Mr Hutton’s own family is among those capitalising on Britain’s property boom will be an acute embarrassment for him.
Nah, he will just dismiss it as a ‘right-wing conspiracy’.
The Left-wing commentator, who appears regularly on BBC television and writes in The Observer newspaper – which he used to edit – has often railed against the iniquities of the property market.
He has been particularly scornful of what he believes is Britain’s socially divisive obsession with owner occupation. Property developers, people who buy to let and middle-class families who live in gated communities have all come in for criticism.
He is trying to shame them out of their well-appointed homes so that he can snap them up on the cheap and re-sell them.
Will Hutton, eh. The High Priest of Pieties. The Sultan of Sneers. The Prince Regent of Redistribution.
Makes you wonder how many other capitalist skeletons are rattling away in the Guardian closet.
They need some stickers which say: “Warning: heading up Hamas can seriously damage your health“:
The head of the Hamas militant Islamic movement in Gaza, Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi, has been killed in a targeted Israeli missile strike on his car.
Mr Rantissi’s death came 26 days after the founder of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, was killed in another “targeted killing” by the Israeli military.
Next candidate, please.
Some months ago, David Carr and I had a quick and long forgotten conversation over the subject of withdrawal from the European Union. It is a hardy perennial that fades in and out of debate. This time, I was interested in the ‘Greenland option’ where a region had stayed loyal to the crown of Denmark but had exited the EEC. Similar constitutional anomalies bind the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man to the Crown. The option was not considered realistic because we concluded that the EU would never countenance losing larger portions of their members.
Think again! Labour MEP, Eluned Morgan, tabled a question to Romano Prodi, President of the European Commission, asking if Wales would remain a member of the European Union if it declared independence. Prodi appeared to indicate that any region declaring independence would have to reapply for membership.
Asked if a newly independent region would have to leave the EU and apply for accession afresh, Mr Prodi said: “When a part of the territory of a member state ceases to be a part of that state, eg because that territory becomes an independent state, the treaties will no longer apply to that state.
In other words, a newly independent region would, by the fact of its independence, become a third country with respect to the union and the treaties would, from the day of its independence, not apply any more on its territory.”
His answer, written on March 1, also said any application for EU membership would require negotiation and consent of other member states.
Plaid Cymru, the Welsh nationalist party, viewed the eruption as a spoiler for their spring conference and noted the constitutional implications:
But Plaid Cymru last night rubbished the claims. Jill Evans MEP described it as “nothing more than a spoiling attempt by New Labour on the eve of our Spring Conference”.
She said: “The United Kingdom is constituted as a state through the respective acts of Union in 1536 and 1707. If either act is repealed, the UK as a nation state will no longer exist. On the basis of Romano Prodi’s letter, if Wales and Scotland were to become independent, all component members of the UK including England would have to reapply for EU membership. These ridiculous claims should be treated with contempt and are pure nonsensical.”
If Prodi’s reading of European law is correct, then declarations of independence by the constituent parts of the United Kingdom, followed by the dissolution of the Union, would be sufficient for withdrawal from the European Union. This provides food for thought since the campaign for an English parliament and for English independence now has another virtuous outcome.
Good news so near St. Georges Day!
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery then surely accreditation must run it a very close second. There may well be pundits and scribblers who do not experience the frisson of pride when their work is quoted in other media but, if so, then I have never met them.
Speaking for myself, I simply love it when other people link to my articles or quote from them. Nor is my satisfaction diminished by even the smallest degree who link to my articles as evidence that I am mad, bad and dangerous to know. It’s the recognition, stupid. Even if my attributors despise every single sentiment I ever express, at least they consider me significant enough to be worth drawing to the attention of others.
However, some people take quite the contrary view. In this case, a certain Mr. Greg Truscott of the South London Press.
It seems that Mr.Truscott has been filing reports about the nasty violent crimes which occur with disturbing regularity in and around South London and which are published on-line at the South London Press website (above). → Continue reading: “Quote me and I’ll sue”
As Antoine is fond of pointing out here, the French are not totally supine in the face of radical Islamism:
Yahia Cherif, who preached in Brest, on the coast of Brittany, was deported to Algiers after being found guilty of “proselytism in favour of radical Islam” and “active relations with a national or international Islamic movement linked to organisations promoting terrorist acts”.
He was also found to have incited violence and hatred against people due to their origin. During the hearing, a lawyer representing the interior ministry cited evidence supplied by French intelligence to accuse Cherif of calling for a jihad during a sermon on March 19. The call represented a threat to national security, he said.
Cherif had also asked his followers for active support of Jamal Zougam, the prime suspect held in connection with the Madrid bombings, in which 191 people died.
Here is the case against deporting Cherif:
His lawyer argued that he did not promote terrorism but had been a victim of it, since he had witnessed his own father’s murder in Algeria. He said he feared for Cherif’s safety at the hands of Algeria’s military authorities.
I know that there is an argument that people like this just, you know, giving sermons, is just them exercising their right to free speech, but meanwhile, this man was clearly breaking French law as it actually is, and from the sound of it he certainly intended his words to give rise to actions. So my immediate reaction to this story is, in the words of the Sergeant Major with the moustache played by Windsor Davies in It Ain’t Half Hot Mum: “Oh dear. How tragic.”
As was this. Not.
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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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