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This has to rank as one of the strangest reports I have read so far this year:
I find clowns deeply irritating but surely lethal force is a little excessive. Don’t they have custard pies in that part of the world? February 22nd, 2007 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
 As in: creative accounting:
Convince as in force people who do not want newspapers to pay for them nevertheless. I do not know who Steven Rattner is (here are a few clues. His wife is apparently a fundraiser for the Democrats). Nor do I know what the Quadrangle Group, LLC is, of which he is managing principal, whatever that may mean (again, some clues here). But he seems like a fool. The entire essay of which the above recommendation for plunder is the concluding paragraph is about how Americans are becoming less interested in “the news”, and more interested in other things. Which is why, actually, they are less willing to pay for the news than they used to be. It is also about why tradesmen do not need newspapers any longer to reach potential customers, which is why tradesmen are less willing to pay for newspaper readerships. That ought to lead to a simple recommendation to potential investors in newspapers. Do not invest in newspapers. Let people tell each other the news for free, for instance by people writing and reading blogs. If some still want the news, then let them read news blogs, which gather together what various different bloggers think is the news. But Mr Rattner seems to love newspapers. So, seeing no profit in newspapers as a business, he switches to the second-last resort of the scoundrel, a bare-faced claim that the taxpayer owes him and his friends a living. Having ceased to be attractive to mere readers, newspapers must be transformed, by some kind of political hocus pocus, into “essential services”. Like the BBC, if you please. And when all that falls on deaf ears, he will presumably go with the cosmeticised version of the same claim, about how taxpayers should pay for newspapers despite not wanting to read them anymore, because this is their patriotic duty. February 21st, 2007 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
Via the Norman Geras blog (and in turn via Glenn Reynolds), is a long letter that challenges head-on the disgraceful spectacle of Iran’s conference of December 2006 to “debate” whether the Holocaust existed. Good. It is a letter that reminds us that thousands, maybe millions, of Iranians do not subscribe to the same claptrap as its leaders. It is welcome and important that such views get an airing. I hope it happens a great deal more often. February 21st, 2007 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
I have just discovered that I am clearly a member of the scofflaw demographic, as I suspect are a great many of Samizdata’s contributors and readers.
Great article, read the whole thing. February 21st, 2007 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
Sometimes you see a set of numbers and they really make you sit up and gasp:
Nice work, Messrs Sarbanes, Oxley and Spitzer. February 21st, 2007 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
We know what she is smoking (see below), so the real question is: What is taking her so long to move there? 
February 20th, 2007 | 35 comments - (Comments are closed)
You can almost hear the crunch of gritted teeth as the Guardian reports on how kibbutzers have “allow[ed] the market to take the place of the idealism”. February 20th, 2007 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
One of the sad things that happened in the cold war was that the two sides each found allies in the third world, and what was best for poor countries got lost in the global realpolitik. This was saddest in Africa, where in many cases the anti-colonial rhetoric of communism and the money and weapons provided by the Soviet Union (combined with the fact that many of the African colonial powers were American allies of one form or another) led to many countries embracing socialism. This was of course a catastrophe, in that pretty much without fail the countries that took the socialist road were impoverished by it, not to mention being involved in wars that could and should have probably been avoided. The socialist rhetoric is now largely gone, and most African countries are now more over-bureacratic and corrupt than particularly ideological. That said, the ideas live on in the minds of many of the people who were involved in African struggles. Listening to South African government officials talking about appropriating private propery is rather depression. One would hope that they could look north at Zimbabwe and see what is not the solution. And it lives on in other ways. One way is in the names of streets in places like Maputo. I think it would be a good thing at this point to formally disavow certain aspects of the past. But there seems to be a certain lack of that kind of bravery.  Tosser
There is perhaps one redeeming feature, however. Near the botanic gardens is to be found a statue of Samora Machel, the first post-independence president of Mozambique. As it happens, this statue was given to Mozambique by the North Koreans and Kim Il Sung, which perhaps explains the slightly wacky style.  However, the statue hasn’t received much maintenance, and many of the words on the plaque below it have crumbled away. In particular, the whole section explaining when and how the statue was erected is gone, and there appears to have been no attempt to repair the sign and return Mr Kim’s credit. That is something to be thankful of, I suppose.  February 19th, 2007 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
Here on Samizdata, we do not have a single ‘editorial line’ and therefore we sometimes disagree with each other. And this is a case in point. Midwesterner has stated that:
Actually there are loads of them. If a foreign state wants to subsidize (say, mp3 players) that I buy at the expense of their hapless taxpayers,well, more fool them. In the long run it is unsustainable and if at some point their wicked government stopped the export of said products, then the glory of capitalism is that domestic producers will simply re-appear or an intermediary market for importing them via a third party will pop up, but in any case it is hardly a tragedy for the overseas people purchasing said products. Is it ‘fair’ to the mp3 player manufacturers elsewhere else? Wrong question because trade is not about fairness in that sense. If it is ‘unfair’ that a country (say, Taiwan for example) subsidies a product to make the price lower, why is it not ‘unfair’ that a western state makes me pay more for my mp3 player because they have forced domestic mp3 player manufacturing companies to expend vast sums on welfare payments and other labour cost increasing regulations and hence making them uncompetitive? As the USA is generally less regulated than most other countries, by the logic of ‘fair trade’, no one else should allow the US to import ‘their’ unfairly under-regulated products into their over-regulated markets. If you follow the logic of ‘fair trade’ rather than ‘free trade’, a nation-state should not allow its subject people to trade with anyone not subject to that nation-state’s laws (i.e. there should be no international trade at all), otherwise it is bound to be ‘unfair’ in some way. Labour costs, raw material costs, ease of market entry, etc. etc. are always going to vary. Moreover, it is a mistake under most circumstances to accept that buying a product from a foreign company is trade between (say) the UK and US. Unless a state of war exists or I am trading with a state owned company, trade occurs between me and a company, not ‘my’ nation and some other nation. Unless the company I trade with is largely an adjunct of a foreign government, it is just trade between private people. To think otherwise suggest accepting that the state has a controlling interest in every economic action you make, even if the other party is not subject to its sovereignty. From both moral and utilitarian perspectives that is a serious mistake. February 19th, 2007 | 59 comments - (Comments are closed)
Five consecutive years of record trade deficits. There are very few rationalizations for supporting unilateral global free trade, but in the spirit of David Letterman, here’s my top ten. Starting with: And, the number one rationalization of unilateral free trade, drum roll please: Seriously, → Continue reading: Global free traders have some explaining to do February 19th, 2007 | 42 comments - (Comments are closed)
The continuing story of Samizdata people meeting in the USA in order to conspire, drink, shoot and eat… 
The poison of the evening was both delicious and lethal in equal measure, which eventually necessitated…
…the development of some innovative instant sober-up techniques…
… which proved surprisingly popular The following day, we took out our hangovers on the surrounding environment…
…and scared local wildlife by creeping around and pointing basters at them… …large quantities of .40 were expended at metal objects…
…although we did not end up eating a local turkey, we had a sublime lamb dinner I am not a believer but if there is indeed a ‘happy hunting ground’ in the hereafter, I think it will look something going shooting with your close friends followed by a meal of epic quality. February 18th, 2007 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
Bryan Appleyard has a terrific piece in defence of 4×4 vehicles, often dubbed as “Chelsea Tractors” on account of their often being driven by well-heeled west Londoners in the narrow streets of said neighbourhood rather than being driven in muddy village lanes. He says what I suspect has been the obvious point, which is that class hatred and the current puritanical culture explains what fires the dislike of these vehicles. The amount of petrol consumed per mile has, I expect, not got a lot to do with it.
I can sympathise, however, with some, not all, of the annoyance that these vehicles provoke. Their drivers are often terrible, imagining that their being surrounded by massive lumps of metal means they are somehow absolved from the rules of the road. They gobble up a lot of parking space, which is at a premium in highly-taxed London. They have a higher centre of gravity than most cars and yet some drivers do not adjust their driving to take account of this. And I occasionally do wonder quite why a person needs such a large vehicle to take little Johnny to school or do the shopping. But whether I think people should or should not “need” to have such a vehicle is beside the point. I have an opinion, but the Greenies want to use the coercive power of the state to limit our motoriing ambitions, and I very much doubt that concern for the welfare of the planet has much to do with it. Talking of politics of envy and massive City salaries, this article is worth a look. February 18th, 2007 | 49 comments - (Comments are closed)
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