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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Yesterday I watched the Queen’s Speech – where the government lays out its plans for the new session of Parliament.
I have always had mixed feelings about this event. I like the colour and ritual, but I do not like the fact that a person (the Queen) has to read out a speech full of plans that they may not agree with, and I do not like the fact that the speech is often full of lies and the plans are often very bad.
Yesterday’s speech was indeed a mixture of lies and bad plans. For example, the government will continue its policy of ‘sound finance’ (in reality there is a vast government spending deficit, and there is also a vast credit money bubble produced from the ‘independent’ Bank of England).
There are to be about 30 new bills to be presented to Parliament, mostly on subjects that the government has legislated on often before. It is like watching the latter days of a Greek city state, or the decline of the Roman Empire – every problem needs a ‘new law’ and if this measure does not work (or makes things worse) then there is another measure and another. Some of the new measures are nasty (such as yet another effort to get rid of trial by jury in fraud cases), but many are just silly and have been done before.
The leader of the Liberal Democrat Party (‘Ming’ Campbell) was correct when he said that the Labour party had come into office saying “education, education, education” but had followed a policy (on all matters) of “legislation, legislation, legislation” with hundreds of new statutes and thousands of Statutory Instruments (measures that have the force of law, but are put in place by Ministers and Civil Servants rather than Parliament) being created since 1997.
Of course Sir ‘Ming’ did not point to the source of a lot of the regulations the government has put in place (the European Union), and he tried (as ‘progressive’ politicians tend to try to do) to be anti C02 emissions and anti-atomic power at the same time – but he had made a good basic point. Passing laws does not solve problems, indeed it often makes them worse or creates different (and worse) problems.
Before anyone points it out, I fully accept that things were much the same under the last Conservative party government (that of John Major).
A couple of days ago the Congregation of the University of Oxford voted to give outside professional managers more power over the university (it is not a done deal yet – but the plan is now well under way).
The vote showed how things are done in modern Britain. Half way through the debate a letter from the government was produced (by some ex top Civil Servants who are now Oxford dons) and read out – basically the message of the letter was simple, the government has not pushed ahead with ‘reform’ of the university because it expected the people there to “reform” the place, but if they do not do so… So change will be “voluntary” in the sense of an “offer you can not refuse”.
Scholars have been living in Oxford for a long time, perhaps there really were some there in the time of Alfred the Great (as the old stories say). First on an informal basis and then (in the 13th century) in organized ‘colleges’ – communities of scholars who ran their own affairs.
There has always been some government involvement in Oxford. Grants of property (as capital) by various Kings to start up some of the colleges (although private individuals financed the creation of others). Parliament (under the influence of various monarchs) laying down rules concerning religious practices. Even sometimes changing the structure of the university (as with the reform measure of Gladstone).
However, the basic structure of Oxford remained. Colleges as groups of self governing scholars. I can remember when the only non academic staff at Oxford were the cooks, cleaners and the men who guarded the gates of the colleges (who also kept important records). → Continue reading: A bad day in Oxford
Road pricing has just got a big push in the Queen’s Speech. Quoth Her Maj:
A draft bill will be published to tackle road congestion and to improve public transport.
More detail here:
The government will press ahead with plans to introduce trial road-pricing schemes across England, in an effort to cut congestion.
The draft Road Transport Bill gives councils more freedom to bring in their own schemes in busy areas and will look at the scope for a national road toll.
It also gives councils a bigger say in improving local bus services.
I am in favour of all this. At present, transport in the entire Western World is a mess worthy of the old USSR, the extra dimension of insanity being that the queues for the products park themselves on top of the products.
To me, this is the most interesting bit:
If the trials are successful, a national scheme could be investigated – with drivers possibly paying £1.34 a mile to drive on the busiest roads at rush hour. Black boxes in cars could work out how far they travel on toll roads.
Once you have “black boxes” in cars, the way is open to start arguing that the black boxes need not provide the Total Surveillance State with a constant stream of surveillance material, but only with information about whether the fees have been paid or not, for that particular black box. Obviously that will not be how the scheme starts by being implemented. The black box will reveal everything about you, your fingerprints, your grandmother, etc.. But nevertheless, these black boxes just might be the thin end of a wedge that separates road pricing arguments from civil liberties arguments, sane pricing of road use (good) from the Total Surveillance State (bad).
I now have an Oyster card for use on the London Underground which I bought, without telling them even my own name. This is just a debitable ticket. Black boxes in vehicles could be like that. Like I say, they won’t be. But they could. Black boxes could merely be the automation of the process of chucking a coin out of your car window into a big bucket and proceeding on your way.
Black boxes will surely also make it possible to have much more precise pricing, of how much road you use, and when. At present, in London, all you are allowed to do is buy the equivalent of a one-day all zones travel card, or not. Those are your only choices, even if all you want to do is pop into the edge of the C-zone for a quick lunch, and then pop out again.
Could it be that those people who have been stealing number plates to pass their London Congestion Charges on to the poor suckers they stole them from are the ones we have to thank for this? Could that be what blew the whole photo-everyone’s-number-plates paradigm for road pricing out of the water? If so, well done them.
Or am I being just too crazily optimistic? But please note: I am not saying that any such separation, between pricing and surveillance, ever will occur, merely that it will become a little bit easier to argue for.
All I can say is they launched something.
Blue Origin is working on a derivative of Dr Gaubatz’s DCX so my guess is they did a low peak altitude take off and landing test, the first ‘push on the envelope’ of a long series.
The Classic Version
The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks he’s a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away. Come winter, the ant is warm and well fed. The grasshopper has no food or shelter so he dies out in the cold.
The Modern Version
The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks he’s a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away.
Come winter, the shivering grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while others are cold and starving. BBC, ITV and Sky show up to provide pictures of the shivering grasshopper next to video of the ant in his comfortable home with a table filled with food. Britain is stunned by the sharp contrast. How can it be that, in a country of such wealth, this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so?
Then a representative of the NAAGB (National Association of Green Bugs) shows up on ‘Newsnight’ and charges the ant with ‘green bias’, and makes the case that the grasshopper is the victim of 30 million years of greenism. Kermit the Frog appears on Oprah with the grasshopper, and everybody cries when he sings “It’s Not Easy Being Green”. Tony and Cherie Blair make a special guest appearance on the BBC Evening News to tell a concerned interviewer that they will do everything they can for the grasshopper who has been denied the prosperity he deserves by those who benefited unfairly during the Thatcher summers.
Gordon Brown exclaims in an interview with Jonathan Dimbleby that the ant has gotten rich off the back of the grasshopper, and calls for an immediate tax hike on the ant to make him pay his ‘fair share’. Finally, the EU drafts the ‘Economic Equity and Anti-Greenism Act’ retrospective to the beginning of the summer.
The ant is fined for failing to hire a proportionate number of green bugs and, having nothing left to pay his retroactive taxes, has his home is confiscated by the government. Cherie gets her old law firm to represent the grasshopper in a defamation suit against the ant, and the case is tried before a panel of judges that Tony appointed from a list of single-parent welfare moms who can only hear cases on Thursday’s between 1:30 and 3pm when there are no talk shows scheduled. The ant loses the case.
The story ends as we see the grasshopper finishing up the last bits of the ant’s food while the government house he is in, which just happens to be the ant’s old house, crumbles around him since he does not know how to maintain it. The ant has disappeared in the snow. And on the TV, which the grasshopper bought by selling most of the ant’s food, they are showing Tony Blair standing before a wildly applauding group of New Labourites announcing that a new era of ‘fairness’ has dawned in Britain
(original provenance unknown)
Not good. Michael Barone explains:
Almost all incumbent House Democrats voted against a free-trade measure as innocuous as the Central American Free Trade Agreement. Protectionism has become a partisan issue, with virtually all Democrats for and most Republicans against. So you can score a Democratic victory, like this year’s, as a victory for protectionism. It will certainly have consequences. Trade promotion authority lapses on June 30 next year, and the chances that the Democratic Congress will renew it are close to zero. The Doha round of world trade talks is currently stalled and unlikely to be renewed in time for an agreement to be sent to Congress. In any case, the fact that the Agriculture committees will be chaired by Tom Harkin from corn-growing Iowa and Collin Peterson from the wheat-growing Minnesota Seventh District means that the 2007 farm bill will not meet the standards of any Doha agreement that could conceivably be reached. The lapsing of trade promotion authority will doom the regional and two-country trade agreements that special trade representatives Robert Zoellick, Rob Portman, and Susan Schwab have been negotiating. We won’t be moving toward more protectionism, probably. But we’re going to miss many chances to advance free trade.
“Spectacular City – Photographing the Future”. Photographic exhibition at the Netherlands Architecture Institute, Rotterdam, until January 7, 2007, and then touring, to the NRW Forum in Dusseldorf and subsequently to further venues.
One of the great things about the internet is that it is possible to start on a familiar blog, and end up not much later at somewhere you would not have imagined being a couple of links before. And sometimes, the virtual world gets left behind, and you end up somewhere in reality you weren’t expecting to be.
For instance, on Tuesday of the week before last, I started at the blog of Willam Gibson (the famous William Gibson), and before I knew it I was simultaneously at the delightful Japan Probe and the website of the Netherlands Architecture Institute, which was apparently featuring an exhibition entitled “Spectacular City”, which was a phtographic exhibition of modern urban buildings, supposedly attempting to reveal things about cities through photographs of their less observed details. The blogged photograph on the immediate link, the Ministry of Transportation in Tbilisi in Georgia, made the exhibition look promising, especially given that I enjoy looking at modern uses of Soviet architecture at least as much as the next guy.
As I am also someone who loves few things as much as visiting suburban shopping malls, housing estates, and transport infrastructure in foreign cities, I was intrigued. I checked the location of the architecture institute in question, and was gratified to discover that it was not in Amsterdam but in Rotterdam. This is a fitting place for it. In the sense of modern architecture, Rotterdam is one of the more interesting cities in Western Europe, although one or two Spanish cities have been making a good claims recently. The combination of a city completely flattened by bombing, and a lack of the architectural timidity of London or the pomposity of Paris (and the perhaps not coincidental fact that Rotterdam post war became one of the key points of European transport infrastructure – more on that in my next post) led to a really interesting, experimental, and modern (in the best sense) city being created.
However, the real reason I was gratified was that it meant that the exhibition was relatively easy for me to visit. By a strange coincidence, I was planning on being in Antwerp a few days later, in order to go to the slightly naff Belgian/Dutch/German version of Night of the Proms, which is somewhat less musically rarified and much more poppified than the British version, but is none the less rather good fun. That took me up to Saturday night, and my train ticket back to London was for Sunday evening. My plans had been to spend most of Sunday pottering around in Antwerp – a nice city for it – but Rotterdam is only an hour north by train, and there was nothing stopping me from nipping up to Rotterdam on Sunday and having a look for myself.
(Quick summary of the Belgian Night of the Proms: given that Tears for Fears were a band with two strong vocalists who wrote and performed somewhat overblown songs with a huge instrumental backing, they are never going to be better than accompanied by a full orchestra, a 40 strong choir on the back of the stage, three aesthetically pleasing front of the stage backing singers, and assorted drummers, pianists, and other musicians. Given also that there are a band whose repertoire really only consists of three really good songs and about four or five good ones, not terribly much is lost through their sharing a bill with other performers. On the other hand Texas are a group of slightly more musically sparse Glaswegians, and are probably better by themselves with a full set: more songs, less embellishment, and fewer distractions. Also, when they were performing the three aesthetically pleasing backup singers had changed into the most interesting of their thirty seven different costumes for the evening: outfits consisting of rather tight jeans and red corsety things that were probably illegal in Korea until recently. Male weakness meant that I was distracted. But none the less, it was a fun evening. It may not have been as fun if it had been in London, but Belgium was the right place for it).
In any event, architecture. Rotterdam. If you are a building, being the Netherlands Architecture Institute is probably like being the Vienna Philharmonic if you are an orchestra. Everybody expects you to be the Vienna Philharmonic. This is probably a bit much on an evening when you have been to the pub and have had one too many. And the NAI is a decent building trying a bit hard, but nothing really special.
Walking into the building and into the exhibition the first thing I saw was an aerial photograph of Paris inside the Periphique: the Eiffel Tower, the wide Boulevards designed by Baron von Haussman, practically picture postcard stuff
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I steeled myself for disappointment with respect to the exhibit. Paris inside the Periphique is not a city that has grown from its lesser observed pieces. Paris inside the Periphique is a city in a corset, almost literally, although in this instance of a kind legal (and probably fairly common) in Korea. The city is full of legally protected buildings, height restrictions, prohibitions on selling newspapers in cafes, and worst of all, buildings owned and designed by governments. There is modern architecture, but it is monumental and government sanctioned. The city boundary corresponds with the aforementioned Periphique, an elevated motorway that surrounds the city, seemingly holding the picture postcard Paris within. The City is just a museum – it is full of governent but does not seem to have any sort of functional wealth generating economy within. It is beautiful, but it isn’t interesting.
Paris outside the Periphique is much more interesting. → Continue reading: In between
Not the baby, but the luggage.
– A Danish airport security person yesterday, explaining to a passenger what did and what did not need to go through the X-Ray machine.
Today is Remembrance Sunday, and outside Westminster Abbey there is a Field of Remembrance. The field’s crop consists of young men, each commemorated by a wooden cross. I took photographs there last Thursday.
The most effective pictures for evoking what it all looked like were those which hinted at the sheer number of wooden crosses, which in their numbers of course only hinted in their turn at the number of young men killed in war in recent decades.
Who, I wonder, is that particular young man, who was, like me, taking photos? Probably, also like me, just going for an effective shot, rather than remembering anyone in particular. He is (as I later did in the exact same spot) photographing the backs of the crosses nearest to him. The nameless dead.
Other photographers focused tightly in on one particular name and one particular cross.
The oddest photograph I took that day was of a car number plate, on what looked like an official, government, chauffeur-driven Rolls.
At any other time, and with no poppies on the front, that would be a good laugh. But with poppies everywhere, it seemed very peculiar.
Here, alas, is another relevant BBC story.
No, I cannot actually read Danish
Yesterday morning, I strugged to get out of bed after the Friday Samizdata party, caught the train to Stansted airport, caught the early flight to Aarhus in Denmark, caught the bus into town, took lots and lots of photos for a large Samizdata posting, and then checked in to my hotel. Wifi was provided in the lobby but not in the rooms. Oh well, good enough. (The group of intense looking young men crouching round a laptop and speaking Russian at the table in the lobby closest to a power outlet does add to the atmosphere, but also makes it harder to keep my laptop charged).
However, my card reader failed to be packed in the struggle to get out of my flat yesterday morning, so I could not upload the photos for the post. My plans to elicit a “What the <expletive> is Michael doing in Denmark immediately after the Samizdata party?” reaction from the readership had failed.
No problem really – I shall just post the article in a day or two. Meanwhile, Denmark is a land of very flat countryside, nice pubs, friendly, decent and at times brave people (even if they do have a slightly worrying overenthusiasm for historical enactment), adequate coffee, and nice pubs. I am enjoying the weekend out of London.
Bonus question though. What the <expletive> is Michael doing in Denmark immediately after the Samizdata party? Kudos for anyone in the commentariat who can figure it out.
Terror ‘priority’ if Brown is PM
– BBC
Never a truer word. He wants us to be afraid. I for one am going to cooperate on that one point.
I will be spending good sized chunks of the year in Laramie, Wyoming over the next few years due to the company I and my partners in space formed this month. With a part-time return to the free world in the offing, I am (as one would expect of a Samizdatista) looking forward to the renewed exercise of that most basic of human rights, without which the rest are at someone else’s sufference: the Right to Self Defense. I have some preferences in this regard, but I do not consider myself a know-it-all or even a know-it-mostly on the pros and cons of current firearms.
I lean towards two handguns, one for hidden carry and one for open carry. Basically one for town and one for country, where the former is for defense against two legged varmints and the other is for discouragement of four-legged or no-legged varieties one might acciidentally annoy while fossil hunting. I lean strongly towards the Glock 27 for a hidden carry piece. I have been partial to it ever since Russ Whitaker introduced us about four years ago. For back-country I have long felt that Colt Revolvers have the history of reliability and effectiveness I would be looking for, but I am not sure whether a better choice would be the classic Colt .45 or a Colt .38. I can not see a need for the stopping power of a .45 unless I decide to play with Grizzily bear cubs while mama is watching… something I have no intention of doing.(*)
I would love to hear some discussion on others experience, especially any native Wyomans. The majority of my firearms experience is with the typical western Pennsylvania type target and hunting rifles and shotguns; also I am not familiar on a personal basis with the likely threats and behavior of wildlife outside of those Pennsylvania hills.
I would also appreciate information on appropriate Wyoming training courses as I am fully cognizant that after 17 years retraining is the responsible thing to do to ensure the safety of myself and those around me.
 There might be statists in them thar hills… Photo: Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
* No, I would really, really not want to face an angry mama bear with something which would probably only piss her off unless you got it just right while retreating at high speed in the opposite direction…
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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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