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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‘Underground, overground,
Wombling free,
The Wombles of Wimbledon Common are we.
Making good use of the things that we find,
The things that the everyday folks leave behind.’
I was half watching one of those interminable nostalgia programmes on TV last night when my intention was caught by the voice of Bernard Cribbins, whose vocal intepretation of the flawed yet quietly heroic role of Orinoco (not to mention Tomsk, Wellington, Tobermory, Madam Cholet and Great Uncle Bulgaria) in The Wombles will forever have its place in the hearts of all who heard it.
Among the many interesting things he said (did you know that all those endearing dithery mutters were ad-libbed?) was that Womble-fixated kiddies used to go to Wimbledon Common and drop litter there in the hope that a Womble would come and take it away.
This proves something. I am not sure what, but something.
One of the brighter spots for the global economy in recent years has been China. A heady rate of economic growth – 9.7 percent growth in GDP last year – has encouraged some to wonder whether this nation’s decision to hitch its wagon to the star of capitalism can be translated into a more lasting adoption of liberal civil society. So far, the jury is out, but some signs are encouraging. I honestly cannot see how China can long resist reforms to its political arrangements in the long run.
More recently, though, a number of fund managers, banks and economists have voiced a few worries about whether China could be vulnerable to the sort of jarring market moves that hit Southeast Asia, starting in Thailand, back in the late 90s. China has a fixed exchange rate to the dollar, which means that at present Chinese goods are very cheap in overseas markets, but also swells the Chinese money supply. Credit expansion, guided by the state-owned banks, has been rapid, and a lot of the investment has been spent on questionable enterprises. About 40 percent or more of China’s GDP growth is dependent on bank lending. There are many signs that China could be headed for a serious hangover.
One of the biggest worries could be the state-run banks. About 40 percent of all the loans held by these banks are so-called non-performing loans — in other words, they will never be repaid. These banks are in the throes of a major overhaul, as the Chinese authorities in Beijing try to restructure the system along more commercial lines. But in the meantime, the authorities are trying to cut the pace of monetary growth, which may come at a time when the financial infrastructure is in a weak state.
Attending a conference in the City today, an economist, speaking off the record, said this: “Alan Greenspan (Fed Chairman) is a smart man, has access to all kinds of research backup, but he has made mistakes on the economy. Now the Chinese authorities, who are isolated in their Beijing centre, inexperienced in such matters, could make very big mistakes indeed.”
China offers a great deal of promise in the medium term. In the short term, anyone with a few pounds to spare on an investment should tread very carefully. China could be in for a bumpy ride.
A few weeks ago, I opined that the current troubles in Iraq could well be a decisive turning point. In favor of the good guys.
As to Fallujah, well, I am beginning to think we blew an opportunity, although Wretchard continues to keep a candle lit. We have managed to give the universal impression that we retreated from a hard fight in Fallujah. I doubt that is entirely true, but in this war, even the appearance of a retreat is a real defeat for us.
As to al Sadr, though, he is toast, because the other Shiite leaders have turned on him, as predicted.
Representatives of Iraq’s most influential Shiite leaders met here on Tuesday and demanded that Moktada al-Sadr, a rebel Shiite cleric, withdraw militia units from the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala, stop turning the mosques there into weapons arsenals and return power to Iraqi police and civil defense units that operate under American control.
I’ve been flagging up England versus Zimbabwe cricket here because I anticipated that the row about whether England ought to be playing cricket against Zimbabwe, given the state of Zimbabwe, was not going to go away. What I had not anticipated was that Zimbabwean cricket would itself be wrecked by the same processes which are destroying Zimbabwe in general. I should have, but I failed to.
The Zimbabwean cricket team (like Zimbabwe itself) is now a racially and politically polarised shambles:
Zimbabwean cricket will reach meltdown this morning when 15 rebel players and their lawyer draft a letter rejecting the board’s offer of mediation and renewing their boycott. This time they will walk out for good.
“This will hopefully be our final letter,” one of the rebels said. “We’ll probably be set free in about 14 days when they fire us.” The Zimbabwe Cricket Union will be forced to pick Test sides from the willing but hopelessly inexperienced young players who crashed and burned to a 5-0 one-day series defeat against Sri Lanka.
So what have these “rebels” been rebelling about. Well, their problem is that the Zimbabwe cricket team is now being selected, not by people who know their cricket, but by people who know their Robert Mugabe.
As Michael Jennings (who did see this coming a year ago) said on Ubersportingpundit about three weeks ago:
As far as I can see, any argument for continuing to play Zimbabwe is based on the idea that cricket and politics have been largely separated, and that the strongest team is being fielded. This is now manifestly not so, as players are being selected (or not) on racial and political grounds. …
And things have not got any better since then, as Scott Wickstein explained on Ubersportingpundit today.
Tony Blair has said that England “shouldn’t” tour Zimbabwe in the autumn. But he isn’t willing to decide the matter, and I can see his point.
The problem is that the ICC (International Cricket Council) has dug itself into a position of insisting that England must tour Zimbabwe, on the grounds that (now that South Africa has been sorted) politics and cricket must be kept separate, and the dominant ICC voices (i.e. India, and also Pakistan and Sri Lanka) are from countries whose citizens are extremely reluctant to admit to white people that they might have made a mistake. Although actually, they could change their policy now, on the grounds that Zimbabwean cricket has also changed. The Zimbabwean team used to be selected on cricketing merit. Now it is not.
I have just started a weekly environment column for the Brussels-based Centre for the New Europe.
My first article called Reports of My Extinction are Greatly Exaggerated is about the ‘reappearance’ of previously ‘extinct’ species, in this case the New Zealand storm petrel, believed extinct for 150 years. No animal conservation programme can claim credit for this, although with a ban on trafficking, expect a market to develop in contraband. So governmental action may actually provoke the extinction of the bird.
[I am aware that at the moment individual articles do not link, I shall be speaking to the CNE webmaster about this.]
Regulation is the new taxation. Eamonn Butler has an example of this at “Europe’s Favourite Think Tank blog”, as the ASI blog has taken to describing itself:
… Germany is introducing a new workplace regulation, which insists that businesses must take on at least one trainee/apprentice for every fifteen workers they employ.
An excellent initiative to get young people learning a trade, you might think. …
But I wonder whether this concession is one that we free marketeers should perhaps stop inserting into pieces like this. Something more along the lines of “well now let us think of just what sort of harm this state compulsion is going to do” might be more in order, instead of ritual obeisance towards the supposed good intentions of the people who imposed this rule. So, let me see. This one will result in masses of businesses having apprentices who just hang around going through the motions. Wasted young lives, in other words. A classic welfare trap, imposed upon the ‘private’ sector.
But as with all government interventions over the marketplace, there are unintended consequences.
Quite so.
For Germany recently legalized brothels. And, like other businesses, they too are covered by the new law. So for every 15 girls employed, another must be enticed into the trade as an apprentice.
A rather odd result – which just shows what a tangle politicians get into when they start telling businesses how to run themselves.
But what if this “tangle” is actually the whole idea? The people who did this, I surmise, hate business, all business. But recent intellectual trends make it harder for them to say this out loud. So, they just go ahead wrecking businesses anyway, without any public justification, and then they blame the very principle of doing business for the wreckage that they have themselves unleashed. Bastards.
The trouble with the theory of “unintended consequences is that you deny yourself the chance to call people doing harm evil. And calling such people evil might be just the thing to get them to stop.
On the legalising prostitution thing, a couple of years ago the Libertarian Alliance published a piece by a prostitute, who argued that the last damn thing her line of business needed was to be made ‘legal’. ‘Legal’ equals smothered in idiotic laws and regulations (and taxes of course), whereas illegal means she could run her business the way she wanted, uninterfered with, apart from the occasional bribe or two, by meddling government officials.
I am still out on the road, sitting in the Westin St Francis in San Francisco watching a bit of news after several long, long backstage work days at the JPMorgan Technology and Telecoms investors conference. I’ve a lovely view out over the bay from here on the 24th floor.
But that is not why I sat down to write this brief item. According to Fox News an airline flight from LA to DC (still in the air) is being watched closely by US security. There has been little detail on what is up.
Feel free to add any news you hear about the situation.
English weather is talked about, by the English, a lot. This is because if is caused by about nine different things, such as the Gulf Stream, the North Sea, the Arctic, and several other things of equal importance. It can change at any moment. How they forecaste it, I will never know, but they seem to be able to.
Take today. A fortnight ago, Summer had arrived. Then it got colder and wetter again. Then it brightened up, and yesterday, Michael Jennings was being congratulated for bringing the fine weather with him back from Australia. (Welcome back Michael.) That was Sunday. On Monday, Philip Chaston was back to bemoaning the bad again weather.
This morning was even worse. Windy, wet, horrid, and poor windswept me had business elsewhere in London in the morning. When my event began, men were forlornly standing about in their drenched summer clothes. At lunchtime, my business concluded, I waited in a second hand CD shop for the rain, which had suddenly got far worse, to calm down. When it did, and I ventured out, and it then started severely raining again, I scurried to the nearest tube station, and journeyed to my local station, Pimlico. What I found when I emerged from that was something else again.
I found this:
I know what you are thinking. A tree, confused by the early summer sunshine, has blossomed, but then, shaken to its roots by the mad May breezes, it has shed its plumage and been given a good February-style soaking.
But look again at that “blossom”. When I first saw it, on the steps of the station, I of course could see that it was not blossom, and I thought: snow. But actually, it was hail. The hardest, most spherical, most peculiar hailstones I have ever seen in my life. They were perfectly spherical, and looked more like bits of polystyrene than anything natural.
I spent the next twenty minutes snapping artistic type photos of this hail with my Canon A70. In photography circles you are nobody until you have taken close-up, shiny droplet photos of all the various things that water does, when it lands on strange surfaces. So I snapped away at car roofs from close up, hoping that the results would resemble Abstract Expressionism.
The hail stones were not especially big, in fact they were quite small. But having been frozen with great ferocity, presumably at some extraordinary altitude, they appeared impervious to the ground temperature. They floated about in clumps, in puddles, melting not at all. Had my batteries not run out I could probably have carried on snapping away at them for the next hour.
The Dissident Frogman, with whom I discussed this English habit of weather talk only yesterday, said that, yes, in France, if it starts raining, it is liable to rain for the next three days, so there is nothing to be said. In England, you just never know from one hour to the next what the weather will do. Or when. I like it.
There is no political or philosophical message here, just English talk about the weather. But what I most like about stuff like this is that everything interesting to look at is now a photo-opportunity. That I really like. Well done my Canon A70.
As Perry de Havilland mentioned earlier, British and American armed forces may have committed a grotesque crime if reports about maltreatment of Iraqis are to be believed. Having not seen all of the reports myself, I tend to defer to writers such as former British soldier Andy McNab, who made his feelings abundantly clear in the Sunday Telegraph over the weekend. And he speaks with the moral force of one who has undergone torture during the 1990-91 war.
This issue cannot be finessed, or ‘put into a context’, to use one of the more common euphemisms of the age. What happened, if fully proven, is a total disgrace. To say that it puts back the necessary cause of winning hearts and minds is a massive understatement. It is also no good some folk arguing that this behaviour still does not put us on a moral par with Saddam. Of course it does not, although some anti-war folk, including frequent commenters on this blog, would claim that it does. Saddam’s disgusting rule (shamefully supported by the West in the 1980s, I might add) was not comparable to what has happened. But surely as armed forces of liberal, supposedly advanced civilisations, we should hold those in uniform to higher standards than those of the recent deposed Ba’athist regime? Much higher standards, in fact.
I have disagreed in a cordial fashion with noted libertarian blogger Jim Henley on the case for toppling Saddam by force, but never have I been in more agreement with him than on this issue.
[A]ny time you hear the term “consumer advocate”, think “government advocate”.
– Ted Schuerzinger
Journalist Nancy Rommelmann writes, after a surprisingly (to me, anyway) pleasant evening spent with feminist writer Susan Faludi, of sitting on the back steps of her home with her husband and a glass of wine:
It must be hard-wired into humans to want a little patch of earth and grass, a peaceful place to sit at the end of the day, or the beginning, and think, ours.
So true, so simple, and yet anathema to so many.
Read the rest of Nancy’s post for some unsurprising-but-fun gossip that she and Faludi exchanged about a certain tiresome feminist whinger extraordinaire.
Well, no prizes for having seen this one coming. From the Sunday Times headline: When you’re £30,000 down, ID cards look good. So says Sara Smith, a victim of identity theft.
Of course, nowhere in the article does the journalist, Rachel Cooke, make even a halfhearted attempt to explain the reality of ID card technology. Instead, she writes, “For [Sara Smith], a national ID card cannot arrive too soon.” Yes, a national ID card, any national ID card — don’t tell us if it can actually do what it says on the tin, just introduce one and make us feel a bit more falsely secure, please.
Cooke’s article does reveal, though not in so many words, exactly why it was so easy for Sara Smith’s identity to be used without her consent: Sara Smith let it happen.
Smith’s troubles began when she moved home. She arranged for her post to be redirected but, for reasons that are still uncertain, this was never done: her post continued to arrive at her old home, which was why she did not notice when her new Harrods store card failed to materialise. “If only I had,” she says. “That little piece of plastic was the start of it all.”
Some weeks later Smith received a telephone call. On the line was a man who purported to be from Harrods. “We are upgrading your card,” he told her. “Would you mind answering a few security questions?”
At first Smith protested, saying she had no need of more credit. However, she found herself telling him her date of birth and her mother’s maiden name.
Oh, it’s happened to us all. You know how it is — a stranger rings up, you get chatting about the weather, the snooker, or the state of your credit, and the next thing you know, you find yourself giving your most vital security information, for no reason you can really discern.
It’s not that I have no sympathy for Sara Smith; I certainly do. But when you consider her amazing new way of managing her most confidential business — not automatically trusting anyone who calls up asking for personal details, keeping a vigilant eye out for financial documents that fail to arrive in the post, actually looking at the statements for her “few accounts” — is really the way she should have been doing things all along, it does drive home the point that a bit of common sense is the best protection we all have against identity theft. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and when it comes to ID cards, the “cure” is flawed both inherently and practically.
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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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