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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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For all that I am sometimes bemused about the views of the assorted rock stars, media wannabes and other folk gathered around Sir Bob Geldof’s “Make Poverty History” campaign, I was a bit taken aback at this story. A UK regulatory body has banned the group from making any television or radio advertising on the grounds that it is a political group.
It would surely take the wisdom of Solomon to figure out the fine boundaries defining what is and what is not a “political” organisation. So many charities nowadays seem to stray into territory that one might construe as political. Many think tanks, which describe themselves as education or research institutes for the purpose of getting charitable tax status, are often highly political, if not in the simple party sense.
In my view, if a charity is deemed unfit to broadcast its views on the telly, it should be banned, full stop. For example, a radical Islamist or neo-Nazi group claiming to be a charity which is banned from spreading its message should also be banned as such (although some libertarians might argue that even such groups should be tolerated unless their members advocate violent acts with a reasonable chance of carrying them out).
The state has no business trying to define the boundaries of what is and what is not a charity. Ultimately, of course, the way to cut through the problem might be to end the tax breaks that charitable status brings and cut taxes across the board so that the designation of “charitable status” no longer is something decided by the Great and the Good but left up to we mortals to decide for ourselves.
In circumstances which for an hour or two were excruciatingly tense, but which in the end bordered on farce, England today regained the Ashes, by not losing the final test at the Oval to Australia. Champion Aussie bowlers Glenn McGrath and Shane Warne gave England a fright by having them five down by lunch, and it looked as if Australia could soon be in and knocking off the runs. But a first test match century by Kevin Pietersen – what a day to pick! – soothed England nerves. Once it became impossible for either side to win, everyone wanted to end it – England and their fans to celebrate, the Aussies to say their goodbyes and get out of there. But the idiot laws of cricket, or lack of the right law of cricket to cover the situation, caused an absurdly anti-climactic period during which the umpires first said that the light had got too bad, and then faffed about while everyone else just stood about, before they eventually declared the game over.
Channel Four had no intention of just switching off their television coverage, but after all the foolishness, things got back on track, with the celebrations duly being drowned with red, white and blue confetti, jetting out of confetti machines.
It had looked, after more seriously farcical proceedings yesterday when not very bad light had stopped play for the second half of the day, as if the final day might, as a result, not be very tense, but McGrath and Warne soon saw off that idea.
Warne also got two more wickets at the end when it no longer mattered, bringing his tally in the match to twelve, and his tally for the series to forty, if my calculations do not deceive me. Despite ending up on the losing side, Warne has been the Man of the Series for me. Without him, England would have been out of sight in this game by the end of the first day. But Warne beat England back from 82-0 to 131-4, and it was game on from then on.
The turning point of the series, it is pretty generally agreed, was when Glenn McGrath, who dominated in the first test at Lords, trod on a ball and hurt himself just before the start of the second game. He missed that game, and was never the same deadly accurate bowler again, despite manful efforts. In that one moment, the series went from being Australia’s for sure to anybody’s, and it stayed anybody’s until late this afternoon, when England finally got their noses properly in front.
Duncan Fletcher, the Zimbabwean who has been coaching England for the last few years, had to be told to smile at the end, and he fleetingly obliged. He must have been doing a lot right. He is good at avoiding the limelight.
But most of all, I think the difference was sheer luck. England played very well indeed, but they also had just that tiny bit more luck of the good sort, and just a tiny bit less luck of the bad sort. The commentators talk about how England “dominated more”. But England damn near lost that second game, and coming back from 2-0 down would surely have been beyond them. England won four tosses out of five, which made a big difference. And just to take today, Pietersen was nearly run out, and was also dropped three times before he got seriously going – although you could say that this is only fair considering that Pietersen dropped every catching chance that came anywhere near him all summer.
I want to believe that Shane Warne is one of the very greatest players there has ever been, what with England having finally got him to be in a losing Aussie team. But Flintoff got the “Man of the Series” award. But I suppose they have to pick someone from among the winners. (Maybe Warne lost it by fluffing the easiest chance Australia had today to get Pietersen out, and with it, as it turned out, Australia’s best chance of winning the match and keeping the Ashes.)
Read more here, a lot of it by our very own Aussie, Michael Jennings. Scott Wickstein reckons the Aussies did not show England sufficient respect. Maybe.
Finally, a word of praise for all the people associated with Surrey Cricket Club who were responsible for the vast, flat arch of a new stand that now graces the Oval. It has turned a great ground into a ground that is less great in size, but even greater as a place to go and to see.
I happen to be in New York on the anniversary of 9/11 and I visited the WTC site today. Alas, I did not get to see much as the place is open only to the relatives of the victims, may they be remembered when decisions are made…
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I have just moved into a new flat. As I am now living alone, and in my last arrangement I was not, I find that there are a lot of basic odds and ends that I need but which I don’t have already. I particularly need items for the kitchen.
One thing I needed was a microwave oven. While I did technically own a microwave oven already, that one is in Australia. So I went my local large Asda store, and looked for microwaves. They had a good, basic model of microwave oven on sale for £24.41. That is right, £24.41. (Excluding the VAT tax imposed by the British government, the price is even less – £20.77. That is well under 40 dollars). The prices of a great many electrical and electronic goods have collapsed over the last four or five years, but I still find it amazing. I can only have a modest meal in a London restaurant for that price, but somehow it is possible to make a microwave oven in China, ship it halfway round the world, bring it into a large London store, and sell it to me, while still making a profit, for such a miniscule price. The microwave oven I own that is still in Australia and that I bought in 1999 cost me more than three times as much. And through lower prices I am therefore more than $100 better off than I was in 1999, just through that one purchase.
There is not much to be said, other than:
Three cheers for free trade.
Three cheers for globalization.
Three cheers for the internet and other international communications networks, and the global supply chains and massive economies of scale that they bring.
Three cheers for container shipping, and the amazing logistical work that goes with it.
Three cheers for the industrialization of large swathes of Asia.
And, finally
Three cheers for Wal-Mart.
 Photo: Copyright Dale Amon, all rights reserved
It is fair to say that I do not always agree with what I read over at the Lew Rockwell blog, considering its position on foreign policy to be sometimes naive to the point of downright obtuse. (That should get the comments fired up nicely, ed). That said, this article drives home very effectively what might be one of the few silver linings of the terrible effects of Hurricane Katrina: it may undermine respect for the wonders of Big Government and underscore the importance of local initiative in times of great danger.
And this article by David Kopel certainly adds to disquiet about what certain state officials are up to.
Surfing the cable television channel briefly on Friday lunchtime, I came across a CNBC programme about oil prices, in which a couple of analysts fielded email questions from the public about why prices are so high. One guy claimed that the price of oil – currently about 70 dollars a barrel – was grossly inflated by those evil speculators and the “real” price of oil was more like 40 dollars.
Okaaay, said one of the analysts. If that is the case, maybe the emailer should quit his or her day job and take up oil speculation if the “real” price of oil was far lower. Armed with this insight, the correspondent would make a killing, said the clearly rather bemused analyst. It is rare on television to see this sort of nonsense smashed out of the park in such a fashion. Certainly not likely on the BBC.
While on the subject of nonsense about the role of speculators and prices, this is worth a read.
I am not the only one calling for a sense of proportion. The Security Minister for Northern Ireland, Sean Woodward, told Radio 4’s Broadcasting House this morning that despite these disorders most people in Northern Ireland were able to go about their normal lives without disturbance yesterday, and we should not get these things out of proportion.
While I am inclined to agree this is not Armageddon, I would suggest that the Government’s sense of proportion is a touch selective. Had riots with firearms, incendiaries, and home-made grenades broken out in Blackburn at some march by a Moslem sect, would we expect such a calming response? Not on your nelly.
We might have woken up to martial law imposed on Lancashire and Yorkshire. At the very least Charles Clarke would be appearing on all channels advocating internment, massively increased police powers and speeding-up the Home Office’s beloved ID card scheme. There would certainly be nothing else on the news.
Is it that 40 miles of water makes the difference? Is it colour or nominal religion? Or does the security establishment (despite being in a scrap with them on this occasion), still think of Unionist extremists as being somehow on ‘our’ side.
How dangerous is nuclear power? Think about Chernobyl, all those people who have died from radiation as a result of that huge disaster…. A total of 59 over 20 years, it turns out.
The world’s worst nuclear accident is significantly less dangerous to the general public of the continent of Europe than, say, Metropolitan Police drivers, never mind the continent’s public transport systems and its oil refineries. I am unaware of any casualties caused by wind farms, but it is hard to build tall things without someone managing to fall off, or some heavy bits dropping off occasionally.
Buses kill. Ban them now!
It seems many important building in Moscow may still be mined from WWII.
Indeed, the recollections of another NKVD officer only corroborate Krotov’s story. “On October 20, 1941, there was an order to place explosives beneath the most prominent objects in the capital,” Pavel Sudoplatov, once the head of the Central Staff of the Fighter Battalion of the NKVD, wrote in a memoir. According to Sudoplatov, the Bolshoi Theater and other buildings were on the list. They could be blown up only on very special orders, however, and only if occupied by Germany’s top leadership.
The German’s would have found Moscow nights to be rather more high energy affairs than expected… as they watched the last waltz at the Bolshoi.
I ran across this via one of the professional lists I read. It is a fascinating peek behind the scenes of a datacentre that kept going right through Katrina and well into the worst of the aftermath.
The many people like this were (and are) the real heroes of New Orleans.
At last! A how-to seminar for friends of freedom and limited government: the Cato Institute’s October 20-23 seminar on “How to Win Arguments, Win Allies, and Win Friends”.
A free republic rests on an informed citizenry, but more important, it rests on a citizenry willing to resort to persuasion rather than force. And for freedom to persist, freedom’s advocates must acquire the skills of advocacy.
October’s Cato University is a weekend long intellectual feast where you can make new friends, renew your commitment to freedom, and hone your skills as an exponent for liberty.
Speakers include Reason’s Nick Gillespie, the Objectivist Center’s David Kelley, Don Boudreaux of George Mason University, the Cato Institute’s David Boaz, Gene Healy, and Tom Palmer, among others.
Sessions will be held in the F. A. Hayek Auditorium of the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C., as well as at the historic home of George and Martha Washington, Mount Vernon, just across the river from Washington in Alexandria.
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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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