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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Surfing around the net, I came across this now-oldish story about Charles Koch, the billionaire, who is an avid collector of fine wines. He may – I have to be careful here – have been scammed by a seller of fake wine. Instead of buying what he thought was red stuff once owned by Thomas Jefferson, the wine may be er, a bit younger. Oh dear. Given the enormous – and to my mind barking mad – sums of cash that people spend on wine, this is almost inevitable. The same thing can happen with antiques. There have been infamous forgers of paintings. The movie re-make of the Thomas Crown Affair, which I thought was an excellent film, is about art forgery (amongst other things). But I had not come across the idea of someone faking wine itself.
The investment market in wine is now a big business; this seems almost immoral, but then I tell myself, as a student of Adam Smith, Ludwig von Mises and Milton Friedman, that if investors want to punt on the future price of Margaux, Talbot or Mouton-Rothschild, then go ahead. There is even a London-based electronic exchange (Liv-ex) for trading in wines, most of which are French. Trading in New World wines is also large but not done out of a central exchange yet. I am not quite sure the God Bacchus would approve of this: the idea of wine, even if you lay it down for years, is eventually to get out the corkscrew and drink it. But the forgery story is a great one: there has to be a movie in this somewhere.
Of the mainstream development charities, Oxfam is one of the better. Yes, it remains wedded to failed notions of ‘development aid’, but it is less shrill that many of the others. Its Oxfam Unwrapped initiative, where members of the public buy a Christmas present which goes to people in poor countries, strikes me as quite a good idea. Aid sent this way is certainly more likely to get to ‘real people’, rather than be sqandered by political elites like so much development aid.
But good intentions are not enough. Oxfam takes a perfectly good idea then ruins it by encouraging the gifting of goats. Goats are profoundly destructive to economic progress. They are the animal version of Robert Mugabe, destroying wealth and ripping up property rights, by destroying neighbours’ crops. They wreck agricultural land, turning fertile land into dust. As Lord Eden of Winton has said in the House of Lords:
Where there are large populations of goats, there is invariably poverty. Where there is poverty, there are invariably large populations of goats. Goats are marauding and indiscriminately destructive creatures. In his typically trenchant piece in last week’s Spectator, Matthew Parris described them as, “rank-smelling weapons of mass destruction”.
They destroy all vegetation, they kill reafforestation, they promote erosion and, in the long term, help to perpetuate poverty.
So why is Oxfam encouraging us to buy them for poor countries?
One of my great regrets is that I never saw a Lightning take off.
– By regular Samizdata commenter Nick M. I hate to rub it in, Nick, but I did, as a young kid at RAF Mildenhall, Suffolk, on a day out with my old man (RAF navigator in the 1950s). A totally awesome sight and noise: my ears are still probably ringing with the impact.
Here’s a picture of one of these bad-ass beauties.
With all the combination of self-inflicted disasters hitting the British government – lost data, Northern Rock, dodgy donations, ranks of senior military officers stating the bleedin’ obvious about lack of funding – it has been an extraordinary time for the Conservatives. Dead in the water, so we were told by the commentariat, back in September, David Cameron suddenly discovered the wonders of tax cuts – inheritance taxes, to be exact – and the momentum of politics suddenly shifted. There is still a huge way to go as the next general election is some way off, however, and in this environment, the spotlight will shine a lot more brightly on Cameron now that his prospects of getting into 10 Downing Street have increased. This is as it should be.
And one or two people have already concluded that Cameron is a bit of thug under that Etonian gloss. I have noticed the same thing. Thuggery has its limited uses, of course; if it means Cameron has the killer instinct in standing up to the government, excellent. If it brings closer the time when the current government, with its dotty plans for ID cards, etc, get removed, that is good. But there is a nagging worry that I have; with politicians who lack a clear set of principles to distinguish them from their opponents, it creates a vacuum.
I think that Cameron, in general, is not very different from the man he shouts at across the Dispatch Box of the House of Commons, apart from his rather different social origins, speech inflexions and choice of friends. Into that space that might have once be filled by large political differences enters personal animosity. True, in the 1980s, when politics was in some ways far more ideologically charged than it is now, Margaret Thatcher could be pretty savage to poor old Labour leader Michael Foot (personally a most charming man, apparently) and she treated Neil Kinnock (remember him?) as a joke.
But in some respects, as politics crams in to the supposed ‘centre ground’ and ideas matter less, the hunt for power becomes even more vicious. I am not entirely sure this is smart for Cameron to play the schoolyard bully. We Brits are a funny lot. People might, just might, start to feel sorry for Brown (please stay with me on this one). They might think, “Kerist, we all have bad weeks in the office”. I know I do. So that fatal fair-mindedness of the British may assert itself. Which would be a shame, since Brown, wrecker of pensions and much else, deserves to be kicked out.
The next election is in two years’ time. To adjust a famous quote from the late Harold Wilson, that is a bloody long time in politics.
My sparser (even) than usual blogging lately is largely the result of the expanding demands of NO2ID. Thank you to everyone (including several Samizdata contributors) who has added to the avalanche of cheques into our legal fund. The bank clerks in Marylebone High Street are grateful for the work, too.
We (NO2ID) are about to make things even more fun by recruiting a new cohort of refuseniks to join those 10,000 immortals who committed themselves in 2005. In the aftermath of the HMRC data-sharing scandal, the British public is ready for the message that the only way to stop the state from debauching your personal information is not to give it a chance.
When Nick Clegg and Chris Huhne vowed to defy the ID scheme recently, it quickly became clear that not many people really understood what this meant. We have formulated a nice clear promise that anyone at all can make, and set it free, online and off. It will be an interesting exercise in network effects.
What follows is a piece I wrote for public distribution explaining the point of the whole thing:
You might be prepared to go to gaol rather than have an ID card. But you can’t.
David Blunkett has been smugly pronouncing that there will be no ID card martyrs because the intent is to have a system of penalties – like monstrous parking fines – hard to contest in court. So further punishments would relate to failure to pay, not ID cards. That silly distinction is currently irrelevant, since powers of direct compulsion have been dropped, for now. It has not stopped Mr Blunkett repeating it, though.
Subtler minds have been at work. The Home Office plans to make you to “volunteer”. It hopes almost all the population will “volunteer”, before most people have even noticed what is happening. Well before it rounds-up and force-fingerprints a few pariahs. Official documents will one by one be “designated”, so that you cannot get one without at the same time asking to be placed – for life – on the National Identity Register.
The civil servant, Sylvanus Vivian who originated this idea in 1934 – yes, that’s right, nineteen thirty-four – called it “parasitic vitality”. In other words, the scheme is a vampire. It has no life of its own, and thrives only if it feeds. → Continue reading: Just say no
Where do they find these people?:
Today it seems politically unpalatable, but soon the state will have to turn to rationing to halt hyper-frantic consumerism
It is unpalatable because it is f******g stupid, Maddie. And how do you tell the difference, pray, between “hyper-frantic consumerism” and say, the mature, intelligent, oh-so virtuous form of consumer activity that you might favour? No answer to that, of course. We are just supposed to accept the wisdom of rationing by our betters instead of the supposed wild anarchy of the marketplace.
Well, it is Monday, start of the week and all that and a dotty Guardian columnist has got me all fired up. It is almost better than going to the gym.
Update: I urge readers, if they have the stomach for it, to actually read the CiF comment thread. Quite encouragingly, some people get just how authortarian Bunting and her mindset actually is. It is, at last, starting to dawn on the smarter parts of the left (sometimes I think this is a rather select demographic) that the whole Green agenda is poison to genuine, progressive politics. Once, socialists were supposed to be rather keen on consumption, I thought; okay, they were totally wrong about the process of getting more stuff to consume, but consumption was part of the idea. M. Bunting is, of course, precisely the kind of reactionary-in-drag worrywart that Brendan O’Neill complained about the other day.
Update 2: this comment at CiF is worth reproducing in full:
What utter nonsense. I was a child during WW2 and rationing, along with being bombed and losing fathers to the carnage, was suffering and sacrifice, sometimes resulting in lifelong problems due to inadequate nutrition. You know nothing about what we and our parents endured during the war and have no right to compare it to reducing consumption, apparently because dinner party liberals will make us do it. Rationing will not be introduced and it is incredible that a sane person could imagine it will be.
Well said. My only nagging worry is that rationing might be introduced. Never underestimate the sheer fanaticism of the eco-authortarians.
Yesterday I did a posting here about climate, but I hope I will be forgiven for another one today on the same general subject. This one is because, in connection with yesterday’s posting, a commenter copied and pasted this story from Canada, which can be summarised briefly as: Canada is going to have a very cold winter.
I was not surprised by this news, even though many Canadians perhaps are. This is because, ever since doing this posting here a month ago, the notion mentioned at the end of it as hardly more than an afterthought has stuck in my mind. Here is how that posting of a month ago, mostly about giant diggers, ended:
In further interesting environment-related speculations Bishop Hill …
Yes, that Bishop Hill again.
… reckons we may be due for a cold winter, on account of the sun taking a bit of a rest just now. Interesting. We shall see.
Maybe now we are seeing. Maybe. What impressed me about this prophecy, unlike so many others in the climate change rack … , er, field, is that this one had a time frame attached. It concerned this winter. This winter is going to be cold.
Since I am on the subject of cold weather, let me mention another prophecy, also of cold weather to come, also because of the behaviour of the sun, also reported in Canada. Take a look this piece from a few weeks back, about the work of a man called Rhodes Fairbridge. Fairbridge, we learn, explained what causes the sun to influence the earth’s climate in different ways at different times. It is all to do with the alignment of the planets, and consequently the degree to which the sun is close to or quite far from the centre of gravity of the solar system. No, I do not understand that very well either.
What interested me about the article was not that it made any particular sense to me. It did not, and I am in no position to pronounce on its scientific merit or content, which could very well be zero for all I know. No, what caught my attention was that there was, once again, a prediction being made, with some dates attached to it. → Continue reading: There are cold times just around the corner!
If you thought spiders and scorpions bigger than humans were just 1950’s B-movie creations caused by nuclear testing then think again.
Paleontologists from Bristol University and Germany found a rather large scorpion claw in a German rock quarry:
The discovery of a giant fossilised claw from an ancient sea scorpion indicates that when alive it would have been about two-and-a-half meters long, much taller than the average man.
This find, from rocks 390 million years old, suggests that spiders, insects, crabs and similar creatures were much larger in the past than previously thought.
This is not a critter you would want to find under a rock in your garden. Assuming, of course, you have very. very large rocks…
I am feeling rather groggy after a wonderful party yesterday – I also watched the excellent Barbarians-South Africa match in a pub – but this item on a website called Sharp as a Marble is an instant hangover cure. Good heavens – the stuff you can find on the web.
Thanks to Instapundit, I came across this staggering collection of photo images of vandalised speed cameras – called “Gatsos” – on the sides of British roads.
The website I have linked to gives the impression that it is generally rather in favour of this practice, on the grounds that many such cameras are difficult to spot and hence set up as a sneaky way to catch out motorists to make money from fines, rather than actually trying to slow down speeds to cut the risk of accidents. A recent book by Christopher Booker and Richard North contends that the obsession with reducing speed limits on Britain’s roads has not reduced the amount of accidents, although it has made the driving process even more tedious than it can be already.
Frankly, I am not able to judge whether North and Booker’s analysis is correct, although they present a formidable number of facts to demonstrate their argument. Rather, what the extraordinary collection of images of vandalised speed cameras demonstrates is how far Britain has retreated from quiet deference to the rule of law. I think that society needs to have laws and certain laws need to be enforced and respected. It is a perversion of the argument for freedom to state that it implies a lack of respect for the law. Not so. But what is also clear is that in a society burdened with a rising weight of regulatory, nannying regulations, that a degree of blowback, if I can use the term, will occur. Which is a pity. Motorists who hammer along roads in streets near schools and houses are a menace.
Bishop Hill has a couple of good postings on climate themes. We here cannot keep track of all the climate hysteria and anti-hysteria, but he tries do. First, there is this bit of stand-up making fun of Al Gore. Stand-up is cheap to do, cheap to film and easy to stick up on YouTube. Even if YouTube are lefties, they cannot hope to censor everything. Watch this and feel the political climate changing.
The good Bishop ended the posting before that one, a round-up of climate stuff with lots of good links – climate cuttings number 14, no less – with the following:
And that’s it for this time. Thanks to those people who have suggested that I get off my backside and do some more blogging. I will try to oblige, time permitting.
Surely blogging means sitting down on your backside, not getting off it. But, that was the only mistake I could spot.
The deranged individual who forced his way into Hillary Clinton’s New Hampshire campaign office has given us all a wake up call. How much longer will we tolerate the situation where any lunatic can threaten innocent people?
After holding three people hostage for six hours, Leeland Eisenberg, 46, emerged from Clinton’s campaign office in Rochester in a white dress shirt and red tie with duct tape wound tightly around his waist over what he said was a bomb.
The message could not be more clear… ban duct tape now!
Do it for the children.
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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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