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 spend a lot of my time writing a sports minded blog, Ubersportingpundit, which tries to do to sports what Samizdata.net does for economics and politics. Indeed, many of the contributors to this blog also contribute to Ubersportingpundit.
Ubersportingpundit covers the various Australian football codes, cricket, rugby, and UK football. However, I would like to ‘beef up’ the UK football coverage for the coming season. With this in mind, I’d like to invite Samizdata.net readers who have strong views about football and the willingness to express them on at least a weekly basis the opportunity to write for Ubersportingpundit.
I’m not looking for someone to write match reports on Aston Villa vs Charlton Atheletic; I’m more interested in someone writing about David O’Leary’s strategy to take Villa forward on a tight budget and how Alan Curbishley intends to fill the hole left by the sale of Shane Parker to Chelsea.
I am also looking for another cricket correspondent, preferably someone of South Asian background, who will give a different view to the Anglo-Australian cricket coverage that Ubersportingpundit currently supplies. Residence does not matter, but a willingness to cover India, Pakistani, Sri Lankan, and Bangladeshi cricket issues does.
If you are interested, please drop an email to ‘scott’ at ‘ubersportingpundit.com’. Renumeration is at Samizdata.net rates. (i.e., the goodwill and esteem of the editors!)
The world’s largest Muslim nation went to the polls on Monday in its first ever direct elections for President, in a difficult climate. The three main candidates were incumbent President Megawati Sukarnoputri (the daughter of Indonesia’s founding President), General Wiranto, the candidate of the Golkar Party, which was the political vehical of long serving President Suharto, and also General Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, a late entrant who had been President Sukarnoputri’s Minister for Security until he resigned earlier this year.
It is hard to tell what the actual issues in the campaign were. To grossly oversimplify, President Megawati Sukarnoputri is offering more of the same corrupt, inept and incoherent governance, while General Wiranto seemed to be campaigning on a platform of corrupt, inept and repressive governance. General Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s platform of trying to have somewhat less corruption and incoherence in government has proved to be more popular, although not popular enough to get an absolute majority.
So what happens now is that General Yudhoyono and the second placed candidate will fight another run-off election on September 20.
What is really pleasing from a western point of view is that it has been an orderly and fair election, and also, Islamic fundamentalism is not a big issue in Indonesian politics. In a nation of this size, there’s always going to be the extremist fringe, but this election helps demonstrate that extremism is not a vote-winner in Indonesia. As an Australian, I personally am relieved to see this.
The official Iranian delegation to the “Crans Montana Forum” in Switzerland were rather surprised by the special appearance of Reza Pahlavi, son of the late Shah of Iran. His speech on the “Risks of Doing Business with the Islamic Republic” are available in their entirety on the SMCCDI website.
This small sample will give you some idea how blunt the Prince was in his takedown of the mullahcracy:
Second, my message to Western governments is to demonstrate their unity against the Islamic Republic’s policies in a less mistakable and much more pointed manner. Diluted signals are likely to lead to the nuclearization of the world’s foremost terrorist state. I fear that, at some point, a limited military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities may become inevitable, giving the regime an excuse to fan a nationalist reaction. Considering the fact that Iranians, particularly the young generation, favor the West more than anywhere else in the Islamic world, the military option will be the most unfortunate. It will damage the popular base and natural anchor of an increasingly connected globe in the Islamic world, an outcome that serves no one’s interest but the Islamic Republic.”
Many of the DOD press conference transcripts are yawn inducing… but not this one. On June 16th, Lieutenant General Thomas F. Metz, Commander Multi-National Forces-Corp Iraq gave one of the most candid and informative presentations I have yet seen.
This is good stuff. Read and enjoy.
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at the Beeb’s latest gaseous emanation regarding global warming.
Now, I am no climate scientist, but I harbor a suspicion that maybe, just maybe, one factor impacting on the Earth’s climate just might be – now, I’m just throwing this out – the sun. I find discussion of the sun’s impact on global weather to be oddly absent from the reams of paper speculating on how minute variations in various gases here on earth may affect climate, rather like speculating on how adjusting the air pressure in your tires a few ounces might affect fuel efficiency without ever considering the, well, fuel you are putting in the tank.
I have noted the occasional article exploring the correlation between temperature variations and solar activity, and so I read this with interest:
Scientists based at the Institute for Astronomy in Zurich used ice cores from Greenland to construct a picture of our star’s activity in the past.
They say that over the last century the number of sunspots rose at the same time that the Earth’s climate became steadily warmer.
However, the scientists made sure that the reigning anti-materialist orthodoxy of those providing their grants was not called into question by these merely scientific observations, scurrying to observe:
This trend is being amplified by gases from fossil fuel burning, they argue.
and
This latest analysis shows that the Sun has had a considerable influence on the global climate in the past, causing the Earth to warm or chill, and that mankind is amplifying the Sun’s latest attempt to warm the Earth.
The notion that non-human forces might occasionally affect the Earth’s weather can not quite be denied:
Over the past few hundred years, there has been a steady increase in the numbers of sunspots, a trend that has accelerated in the past century, just at the time when the Earth has been getting warmer.
The data suggests that changing solar activity is influencing in some way the global climate causing the world to get warmer.
but of course if this truth were recognized then it would quite knock the props out from under the latest rush to regulate under the banner of Kyoto and global warming. Even when evidence of the obvious – that the sun’s output is what really controls global temperature, and that global temperature swings regardless of human activity – is presented, it must be spun so that human agency, and thus the need for regulation, is paramount.
Laugh or cry? I can not quite decide.
So the loathesome (second post down) John “interesting” Kerry has chosen John “even less interesting” Edwards as his running mate. This is obviously a bad move as people will confuse them, and maybe even vote for someone else called John Nondescriptname instead, but on the other hand, their policies seem to be mostly about saying whatever crowd-pleaser pops into their heads at the time, so perhaps it is a deliberate ploy to make people so confused they can’t keep up with all the turnarounds, and surrender their powers of reasoning altogether (unless that happened already).
Here are some of the things they said about each other in the past. Notice the recurrence of the word “different”. Now see if you can spot which statement belongs to which John. Answers on Fox News.
[John’s policies would run the country] deeper and deeper into deficit.
This is the same old Washington talk that people have been listening to for decades.
I think he’s said some different things at different points in time … So I think there’s been some inconsistency.
[John] and I have very different positions on the issue of trade
This one is easy:
No. No. Final. I don’t want to be vice president. I’m running for president.
And my personal favourite (remember, John is criticising John here)…
I think that the world is looking for leadership that is tested and sure. And I think that George Bush has proven that this is not a time for inexperience in the White House.
How very unintentionally right he is.
I recently wrote about Belinda Stronach’s Conservative Party candidacy in Canada. Reader Jim Bennett reports:
“Don’t know if you noticed, but Belinda Stronach did win her seat in Canada. She’ll probably be shadow International Trade minister — a good place for her.”
Canada could use the touch of an Iron Lady. It will be interesting to see if Belinda can grow enough to fill those shoes.
I am still catching up with my email backlog after a week in which my server was ‘under attack’ by a storm of spam. High on my ‘must read’ list are the transcripts of the various DOD press briefings. I found a gem in this briefing from Saturday, given by Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, Deputy Director for Coalition Operations; and Dan Senor, Senior Adviser, CPA. In the words of Dan Senor:
“And if you look at where we are now, unemployment is about a third of where it was when we arrived. There’s an unbelievably liberalized economy here, free trade, no — outside of natural resources, no limits on foreign investment, tax rates capped, personal income tax and corporate income tax rates capped at 15 percent provides in the long run a very foreign investment friendly environment for Iraq, which is good, while we are in the midst of deploying some $18 billion just from the United States alone, not to include other commitments of the international community. Independent central bank.”
Virtually anyone who reads Samizdata would understand tax rates this low necessarily lead to economic growth and the betterment of all citizens.
Could we perhaps borrow Paul Bremer for a year or two? I believe he may be in need of a job…
Samizdata.net will probably be moving away from Moveable Type and to Expression Engine some time in the not too distant future. I would be interested to hear from anyone who has made this move with their own blog or who has experience using Expression Engine.
It has been obvious to us for a while that MT is groaning under the weight of Samizdata.net (the comments are agonisingly slow for example) and a full site rebuild now takes about 4 hours! We really do need to move on to something better!
Some readers will have observed that I fight an often lonely battle against the forces of the militant lesbian, anti-humanist, fascist, tree-hugging puritan conspiracy to wipe out masculinity. We know as a scientific fact that the best lovers are larger men. I have previously commented on the sexual inadequacy of skinny types.
It is therefore clear that the current obesity obsession in this country is part of a nefarious conspiracy aimed at wiping out Great Britain. Was Henry VIII skinny? Did Winston Churchill eat tofu?
Help is at hand in the form of a marvelous new book Eat What you Want and Die Like a Man: The World’s Unhealthiest Cookbook. The reason for this masterpiece is set out in the Foreword:
I wrote this book because I was tired of being told what to eat. I was tired of the Food Pyramid and vegetable oil and small food. I was tired of pinch-faced little people who actually got angry when I talked about lard and egg yolks. I felt it was time for a backlash. Time to celebrate things like bacon grease and heavy cream. Don’t we have better things to feel guilty about? Like the resurgence of velour?
This is not a serious cookery book, says the author. No doubt he could be sued by the pinch-faced little people.
This post is one of my articles that explains how it is possible to screw an industry up beyond words with excessive regulation, and the consequences of doing so can occur in unexpected places. The story is in this case about how government attempted to protect the BBC and ended up giving enormous quasi-monopolistic powers to Rupert Murdoch. Next week, I shall post a similar history of the regulation or television in Australia, which explains how government attempted to give enormous quasi-monopolistic powers to Kerry Packer, and ended up giving enormous quasi-monopolistic powers to Kerry Packer.
Until a week and a half ago, British people were watching the European Championship football championship between the national teams of the best footballing countries of Europe, the English in the hope that England would win the tournament, and the Scottish in the hope that England would be eliminated early and embarassingly. Neither of these things happened: England played decently but not spectacularly and were eliminated on penalties in the quarter finals. If England had stayed in the tournament the number of cross of St George flags attached to people’s cars in this country would have steadily increased, it would have been impossible to go into a pub and had a discussion of anything else, national euphoria may have even broken out and, sady, there would have been a somewhat unpleasant yob element on the streets shortly after closing time. As an Australian, I think I would have found that (and the fact that the English would have been gloating for years if not decades) a bit much, so I am glad that it didn’t happen. Instead, I watched the rest of the tournament (which finished yesterday evening) with interest both on television at home and in pubs with much smaller crowds than would have been the case if England were still participating. The story of the tournament was that the large heavyweight countries of Europe were eliminated relatively early, and the teams from the smaller countries excelled themselves.
In yesterday’s final the host nation Portugal (regarded as a good side from before the start of the tournament, although not one of the extreme favourites to win it) took on Greece (who at the start of the tournament were absolute rank outsiders who most people would not have picked to win a match let alone the tournament). And as it happened, Greece won a perhaps a little dull and defensive (but with lots of heart) 1-0 victory, and a team that had never won a match in the finals of either the European Championship or the World Cup before are now champions of Europe. (The slightly desperate question of whether the Olympic stadium in Athens will be complete in time for the start of the Games in six weeks now has the added question of whether the Greeks will have stopped partying by then. I was in Sydney four years ago for the 2000 games, and at this point we were just coming to grips with the fact that the games were almost upon us. We didn’t really start partying until the games actually started.
It was not hard to find a place to watch yesterday’s final, because it was on two terrestrial television channels (licence fee funded BBC1 and advertising funded ITV1) simultaneously as well as satellite channel Eurosport. This followed what happened earlier in the tournament, which is that the matches have been divided evenly between the two broadcasters. Half the matches were on the BBC, and the other half on ITV, and who got to show which matches was decided more or less randomly. Neither network has been able to gain an advantage over the other by advertising itself as “The Euro 2004 channel” or anything like that.
This may seem curious. Why is what should be one of the biggest sporting events of the year on two television stations simultaneously? Given that lots and lots of people are likely to want to watch it (or would have if England were playing) would it not be of lots of value to advertisers and therefore wouldn’t the organisers of the tournament want to make huge amounts of money by auctioning the television rights to the highest bidder.
Well, actually no.
Well, actually probably yes, but this is not permitted. → Continue reading: How watching the European Championship football tells us a lot about the history of British television.
On Saturday afternoon, a gorgeous looking Russian seventeen-year-old called Maria Sharapova won the Wimbledon Ladies Singles title, and the media have been in raptures ever since. Personally I was enraptured ever since she won her quarter final against a Japanese lady. But when Sharapova beat Serena Williams in the final, the world really noticed.
When Sharapova plays, she looks like a Bond girl. When she has won, she immediately becomes a giggly American schoolgirl. She is, from the female gorgeousness point of view, the biggest thing in tennis since the now somewhat ageing Anna Kournikova. Plus, she can really play. (Kournikova never won Wimbledon, or anything else big that I recall. Not that I ever cared.)
So, I was not surprised when our very busy-with-other-things but still very caring and concerned editorial supremo asked me last night to dash off a posting about the lovely Maria, so that we could have a picture of her up here.
However, underneath all the drooling from the likes of me and Perry, there is a more serious story here, which is why it took me a bit longer to write this than I promised last night. Yes, Sharapova is gorgeousness personified, and long may it last. But there is more going on than this. → Continue reading: Maria Sharapova comes to America and wins Wimbledon
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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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