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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Following on from Thaddus’s recent posting about how politicians are trying to enlist children in the Green agenda, it is worthwhile pondering why environmentalism, even the more scientifically credible sort, is often depressing, puritanical and unpleasant. Let’s face it, a lot of libertarians’ hostility to Greenery is a suspicion that the Greens are “watermelons” – green on the outside, and socialists on the inside. Socialism, in as much as it has ever been a coherent political and economic point of view, has been economically if not entirely intellectually discredited. It has been a failure, with varying degrees of nastiness, ranging from the stifling if relatively benign version of Sweden through the to mass killing fields of Mao’s China and Pol Pot’s Cambodia. So if you hate capitalism and material wealth then the Green agenda comes in very handy.
There is a danger in this approach, however, and not just because ad hominem points about the motives of one’s ideological opponents often put off the uncommitted. The fact may be that the planet is genuinely getting warmer and that human activity has helped to cause that. Pollution of the air, seas and rivers is a problem for someone who is polluted. The destruction of ancient woodlands and the loss of flora and fauna is bad. So I can see why environmentalism appeals not just to anti-capitalists, but to conservatives and liberals who want to live the good life and ensure there is plenty of that good life around for future generations. There is in fact a school of environmental thought that harnesses ideas of property and markets to make its case.
Another point I’d make is this: why cannot the Greens, or at least the more sensible ones, throw off the image of po-faced puritanism that so often hangs around their pronouncements. His Supreme Blogness, Glenn Reynolds, has interesting thoughts here on how technologies like electric cars and so forth should be sold not as a sort of “hair-shirt” consumer gesture but because such technologies might be fun and interesting for people.
Fun – that is a word one does not hear much about when discussing technological fixes for our planet. Perhaps we should hear it a good deal more.
Spring onions are spring onions (or scallions). Aussies might have recently beat us at a pointless activity (it isn’t sport if you can do it in a chunky-knit tank-top) but they lag well beyond the Northern Hemisphere in the recognition of common-place veggies. And your water goes down the plug-hole the wrong way round… And that’s moral turpitude that is, not the Coriolis effect.
– Commenter Nick M
I was swapping recipe tips on a comments thread recently, and the recipe in question involved soy sauce. I am a big fan of this particular seasoning, and I launched into a lengthy discussion of it. When I had finished regurgitating, I got to thinking – hey! This is good stuff! Why am I wasting this on a comments thread? It could be a discrete blog post! So, ladies and gentlemen, without further ado I present to you Everything You Needed To Know About Soy Sauce (But Were Afraid To Ask):
There are two – and only two – important points that need to be considered if you are to get the most out of your soy sauce investment. The first is in the buying. Look at the ingredients list of the soy sauce you are interested in. It should consist of soy beans, water, wheat flour and salt. That is it. If it has some kind of hydrolyzed protein shit in it or any other weirdness, recall that that is the mark of an inferior sauce. Desist.
The second is in the storing. Soy sauce goes stale. Remember this when considering storage options. Once opened, most leave their soy sauce on the shelf at room temperature. This is not optimal. Storing it in the fridge will keep it fresher (much) longer. Unfortunately, the majority of non-Asians require a couple of years to work their way through a bottle of soy sauce. No wonder; it will start to taste pretty ordinary if opened and subjected to a few months at room temperature. When soy sauce goes stale, it tastes like salty brown water. It loses complexity. Who would want to cook with that? You will see what I mean if you compare the taste of fresh sauce to that of the stuff sitting in your cupboard for the past half-decade. Look, just keep your soy sauce in the fridge and stop quibbling. And if you have not used the bottle after – say – no more than a year, replace it.
Of course, soy sauce is not soy sauce. There are many breeds of this beast, from the light soy poured over cheong fun (the so-called Cantonese cannelloni) at a dim sum banquet, to kecap manis, the viscous, sweet soy sauce common in Indonesian cuisine. The recipe mentioned at the start of this post benefits from a light soy sauce.
And what is this recipe? Perhaps you have had Hainanese chicken – this dish is very similar and very easy to prepare. You need a whole chicken, some roughly chopped shallots (spring onions), a handful of roughly chopped ginger and eight to ten star anise cloves. Put the shallots, star anise cloves and ginger into a large pot and place the chicken on top of it. Fill the pot with cold water – enough so that the chicken is comfortably submerged. Heat until boiling, then allow to boil for a further thirty minutes. Turn off heat and allow to cool for several hours; overnight is ideal. Remove chicken and place on a platter – it should fall apart with little effort and be very tender. Sprinkle flesh with light soy sauce immediately before eating – “immediately” as in when the chicken is on your plate and you are about to stuff it in your mouth.
Some asides – a whole chicken works best with this dish, but you can use whatever chicken you have, as long as it is on the bone. DO NOT use breast fillets – they will become unacceptably tough. Breast meat is over-rated, anyway. It may well be the leanest part of the bird, but it is also the chewiest and least succulent. Why would you pay more for it? It is crap. Thigh meat is by far superior.
Strain the ginger, star anise and shallots out of the remaining water, skim any fat off the surface and add some salt – you now have a pot full of proper, home-made, not-bought-from-the-supermarket, gourmet-approved chicken stock!
This recipe may not sound so tasty – cold, boiled chicken – but trust me, it works. It is ideal picnic food and goes brilliantly with a salad. Perhaps this salad. Enjoy.
Meet the new Soviet, same as the old Soviet:
Teenagers will learn about the threat to the environment from climate change and what they can do about it, under reforms to geography teaching.
They will be encouraged to recycle consumer goods and to question whether they really need another imported pair of trainers. Other topics to be studied include the Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina.
Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary, said: “With rising sea temperatures, melting ice-caps and frequent reminders about our carbon footprints, we should all be thinking about what we can do to preserve the planet. Children are the key to changing society’s attitudes to the environment. Not only are they passionate about saving the planet but children also have a big influence over their own families’ lifestyles.”
In due course, and perhaps even early course, children will be encouraged to rat their parents out to the authorities for ‘unGreen’ behaviour. Such is the pattern for the legitimisation of ruling class ideologies;indoctrinate the young and persuade them of the need to meekly accept poverty, austerity and political control for the sake of ‘saving the planet’.
‘Global warming’ does indeed present a grave threat; as a tool of political power it is a threat to freedom, prosperity, trade, progress and all the health, wealth and happiness that those things make possible and if anyone has been inclined to regard the whole ‘climate change’ nostrum as a joke, then I humbly suggest that this is a mistake. Our masters are clearly taking it very seriously indeed and we have a momentous battle on our hands if we intend to stop them from going down the path that they already begun to forge.
This is a battle we must win – for the sake of the children.
Update: the Libertarian Alliance is also calling foul on this exercise in political propaganda for children.
According to the Spanish newspaper El Pais, Cuban doctors have performed a number of experimental ass treatments on the 79-year old president-for-life since he first fell ill in July 2006. These treatments have reportedly included cork blockage, cork removal, high-pressure steam cleaning, violent stomach-punches from the Cuban national boxing team, Santaria chicken sacrifice, and mandatory public anti-constipation rallies.
Seeking to reassure citizens that El Jefe remained in control, a photo in Havana’s official newspaper last week showed a him relaxing and chatting with visiting Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez while receiving a colonoscopy. This appeared to be administered via an auger bit attached to the rear axle of a 1953 Plymouth.
– Iowahawk
“The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder”.
– Alfred Hitchcock, who was always a practical fellow.
Statists the world over jumped for joy today when the UN released yet another report stating that global warming is due to human activity rather that cyclical solar factors.
Watching the BBC reports about this, one could be forgiven for thinking not a single scientist or logical thinker demurred from that notion. Medieval Warm Period? What Medieval Warm Period? Oh, THAT Medieval Warm Period! No, the approved experts have spoken and no heresy shall be suffered to be reported.
What particularly made me laugh was when the BBC voice over said “and the fact over one hundred governments have endorsed this report will add to its credibility.” So let me get this straight… the fact one hundred states which exercise political power over people have endorsed a report that will be used to justify imposing even more political control over people, and that makes this more credible? I wonder if the BBC would report a pro-tobacco report endorsed by tobacco companies the same way? What do you think?
I have no idea whether the journalists at the Daily Telegraph make it their business to read this blog (although they most certainly should do so, naturally) but this article nicely backed up my point the other day about the economic upsurge of India.
In my posting here, a number of commenters scoffed with disbelief that some jumped up rating agency should be so daft as to proclaim that India’s debt rating has improved, and that the country'[s economy is improving. “My dear boy, this is India!” you can hear them cry. And one commenter, bless him, even suggested that India is still far behind most of Latin America, a comment sure to provoke hollow laughs from any entrepreneural type hoping to prosper in Chavez’s Venezuela. Of course, as I said at the time, India is still moving up from a relatively low base. During the immediate post-war years, the East Asian economies in places like South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan powered ahead while India, influenced by those dreadful Fabians and London School of Economics types who stuffed the old colonial service, embraced socialism, planning and progressive taxes. But the fact, that cannot be denied, is that this country, with its vast, English-speaking population, relatively stable system of property rights and its admirable enthusiasm for the world’s greatest sport, is shooting the economic lights out.
There is just no pleasing some people, it seems.
These Canadians obviously have no sense of fun:
Don’t stone women to death, burn them or circumcise them, immigrants wishing to live in the town of Herouxville in Quebec, Canada, have been told.
Bah! Killjoys.
In the latest pull-out-of-the-middle-and-bin travel supplement in the Radio Times, there is an advert for going on holiday in Cuba:
Warm golden sand touched by shimmering seas, endlessly clear and calm. Sparkling contrasts. A deep sense of harmony. Cuba is life.
Unless you are one of the poor bastards who actually has to live there.
A Cuba tourism website was mentioned at the bottom of the advert. I went there, seeking further Cubanities to sneer at. I was not disappointed. In the Knowing Culture section, I read:
Cuba’s cultura is very prestigious. It happy people live very rooted to its traditions and customs. If you want to know about that go and visit the museums.
“Rooted to its traditions and customs” as in “bugger all has happened for the last fifty years”. Say what you like about communism, at least it avoids disfiguring the landscape with a lot of mucky economic development. Well, muck they can do. It’s the economic development they avoid. Film companies love communism, because huge swathes of ancient places get preserved by it as if in aspic, needing only a scrub-down and then some mending and a lick of paint to bring the distant past back to instant and authentic life.
As the heading says here, about some very boring-looking historical building:
Arranged Historical Place as Museum
A phrase that would do well as a description of Cuba itself. One instinctively knows which questions not to ask.
Meanwhile, back at the Knowing Culture section, the blurb ends thus:
If you take a tour of our cities you will see the development of music, dance or plastic arts, manifestations that have left a trace in the world.
Mostly in Miami.
So, potential tourists living outside Cuba have no problem accessing the internetted tourist version of Cuba. But what is internet access like for the the natives?
With less than 2 per cent of its population online, Cuba is one of the most backward Internet countries. An investigation carried out by Reporters Without Borders in October revealed that the Cuban government uses several levers to ensure that this medium is not used in a “counter-revolutionary” way. Firstly, it has more or less banned private Internet connections. To surf the Internet or check their e-mail, Cubans have to go to public access points such as Internet cafes, universities and “youth computer clubs” where their activity is more easily monitored. Secondly, the computers in all the Internet cafes and leading hotels contain software installed by the Cuban police that triggers an alert message whenever “subversive” key-words are spotted. The regime also ensures that there is no Internet access for dissidents and independent journalists, for whom communicating with people abroad is an ordeal. Finally, the government also relies on self-censorship. You can get 20 years in prison for writing “counter-revolutionary” articles for foreign websites. You can even get five years just for connecting to the Internet illegally. Few Internet users dare to run the risk of defying the regime’s censorship.
Which would explain the “deep sense of harmony”.
No doubt I will be attacked (again) for writing critically about this ‘free market’, ‘pro-American’ journal. However, I will proceed.
The Economist magazine (or newspaper, as it chooses to describe itself) last week had a weird racialist rant against Secretary of State Rice. A whole page devoted to claiming (amongst other things) that Condi Rice went along with the evil Bush on Iraq (that the Economist supported the judgement to go into Iraq was somehow forgotten) because she was black and,. therefore, had learned that the way to get ahead was to conform to the will of powerful white men (Rice as Aunt Thomisina?).
There was also a claim that Secretary of State Rice was a poor administrator who ran the State Department badly – this claim rather pleased me, as it can only have come from State Department staff and anyone who is unpopular with the death-to-America fanatics who have tried to dominate Foggy Bottom for decades can not be all bad.
This week the Economist ran a little article on the trial of Lewis Libby. The article claimed that the defence of Mr Libby (against the claim that he obstructed justice in the inquiry into the exposure of CIA agent – the fact that the person was a CIA staff member, not a secret agent, was of course not mentioned in the article) would be that it was all Karl Rove’s fault. But (the Economist article explained) the guilt of Mr Rove does not mean that Mr Libby is innocent.
In fact the ‘exposure’ of the CIA ‘agent’ was nothing to do with Mr Libby or Mr Rove – the person responsible was Richard Armitage.This is common knowledge and Mr Armitage has himself has admitted it.
The whole thing goes back to the effort of the husband of the CIA employee (an ex-State Department person and donor to the 2000 Gore and 2004 Kerry campaign) to discredit American and British claims about Saddam Hussian efforts to buy materials for his atomic weapons program, specifically from the nation of Niger. Elements in the State Department and the CIA opposed British and American policy on Iraq and so tried to discredit the claims made in support of that policy. Richard Armitage, then working for Secretary of State Colin Powell, tried to fight back by pointing out to the media that the supposedly independent people attacking the Administration were part of these factions in the State Department and the CIA who had an agenda of their own. All perfectly normal in the cat fight that is politics.
I am no expert in these matters, but my understanding is that Saddam was after such material. But the Economist article did not cover any of the basic matters – or even that it was Richard Armitage (not Mr Libby or Mr Rove) who ‘leaked’ the fact that the ex Ambassador’s wife was part of a certain faction at the CIA.
All the Economist was concerned with was the ‘lies’ of Mr Libby and Mr Rove. The fact that, whether or not there should be a court case, the whole thing is directed at the wrong person, Mr Libby not being Mr Armitage, escaped them.
In fact the prosecutor involved is politically motivated (no surprise there, we are dealing with the United States after all) and has attacked Mr Libby in order to attack the Vice President and, through him, the President. The jury is of course stacked with Iraq war critics. I did not think highly of the judgement to go to war myself – but I do not like political show trials either.
As for the Economist’s level of knowledge: It was as if an American journal had run an article about British politics and had talked of ‘Prime Minister Cameron’ and ‘Queen Diana’.
I do not know where the Economist gets its staff from (some ‘school of journalism’ perhaps), but I rather resent that they get paid money for writing about things they know nothing about.
Still, as I am careful never to pay for reading bits of the Economist, at least they are not spending my money.
A great secret has been revealed. Personally I think it explains a lot. Brian Micklethwait is really Gully Foyle.
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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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