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]

More thoughts on the primaries

I must admit to being surprised by the volume of comments that this “Samizdata quote of the day” item provoked; I am not aware that we got linked to by some pro-Clinton blogs. One thing that did strike me about the comments was the apparent ignorance of the new commenters as to the philososphical bias of this blog (pro-liberty, pro-capitalism, small, if not minimal government, robust view on defence, etc). My dislike of Hillary/Obama/McCain/Huckabee/Romney is pretty consistent all the way through. Their unifying characteristic is their belief that government can do many good things and should do these things a great deal. Not one of them has – unless I missed it – made the sort of general, shrink-the-state comments that were the trademark of Reagan in his prime (that’s not to say, of course, that the Gipper actually was as marvellous as some of his supporters might claim). Of course, there remain differences, but none so much to really make a major shift in the direction of American, or for that matter, western politics. If Clinton were elected and we got a re-run of the Clinton psychodrama of the 1990s, it would be tedious, even a dangerous distraction from serious events, but I am not convinced it would be the end for Jefferson’s Republic. On the other hand, if McCain got elected, he’d probably only want to serve out one term, as he is getting on in years.

Why does any of this matter? Well, like it or not, what happens across the Big Pond resonates here. British politicians look for suggestions that western political ideas are moving in a particular way. At the moment, Big Government, Greenery, micro-management of personal behaviours via the tax and legal system are dominant ideas, although there is some fightback. This is why, infuriating though it may be to Little Englanders, the US Presidential elections get so much attention.

I’ll just be relieved when it is over so we can go back to bashing Gloomy Gordon and Dave.

I love it when he talks Austrian…

Hayek? …. Check!
Hazlett? …. Check!
Von Mises? …. Check!

Ron Paul gave an extremely cogent economics talk to Seattle Business leaders which you can watch here.

He even wants to dump Sarbanes-Oxley. What more could you ask?

A favour for a friend in the database state

The writer of this Times story: Pensioner died in attack on his home after parking space row, has, perhaps understandably, concentrated on what exactly Mark, Zoe and Steven Forbes did to the late Bernard Gilbert and whether “We’ll smash his car to bits and then his hire car and then whatever he gets after that until he dies” constituted a considered plan.

However that may be, there is an aspect of the story that deserves a story – and a trial – of its own:

Mrs Forbes was upset and called her husband Mark, who told her to note down Mr Gilbert’s numberplate. He then asked a policeman friend to check Mr Gilbert’s address on the police national computer, using the car registration number.

The innocent have nothing to fear – so long as they have not annoyed anyone who knows a copper who can be persuaded to look up an address.

Remembering a great game and a great team

The 1950s was rather more than about Elvis, Monroe and The Bomb. Slowly, as Britain recovered from the war, the rationing, and the cheerless austerity during the late 1940s, life got better. It is fashionable, for a certain type of writer, to claim that nothing much exciting happened before the 1960s (a classic Baby Boomer conceit); in fact, arguably, the 1950s were as interesting and colourful, albeit with fewer drugs. One institution that came to the fore in that decade of Ealing comedies and curvy sports cars was Manchester United FC, a once unfashionable club (it used to be called Newton Heath). Old Trafford, its ground, was reduced to rubble by the Luftwaffe; a young Scotsman demobbed after the war called Matt Busby, who used to play for Liverpool and Manchester City, took over as manager.

The story of what happened during his extroardinary career at Old Trafford will be remembered as long as football is played. The fortunes of the Red Devils waxed and waned, but inevitably, the tragedy that hit the club in the February of 1958 is indelibly marked on the history of the club. Eight players, plus other passengers, were killed when the aircraft taking the team from a European Cup match crashed in the snow-bound airport of Munich. It is widely recognised that one of the dead, Duncan Edwards, was probably the greatest British footballer of his generation.

Here is a wonderful account of the last game the team played in Britain – against Arsenal – before the European game. It is hard for any English football fan not to wonder at what might have been; at least three, if not more, of the Manchester team could have played in World Cups in 1958, 1962 and 1966. What a waste.

At least it can be said that air travel has gotten a lot safer since. In the late 1940s, the entire Torino football team from the North Italian city were killed in a crash.

May they all rest in peace.

Commercial Space Update

It is a fast moving world we live in and much has happened in the week or so since I last posted on this topic.

John Carmack, head of Armadillo Aerospace, believes they have an understanding of and cure for the ‘hard starting’ problem their Pixel and Texel rocket test articles exhibited in their attempts at the Moon Lander prize at Alamogordo this last October. The hard starts damaged several of their motors and even cracked the bell in one of them. They have a new igniter they are testing which may solve the problems.

There is much news at SpaceX after a long period of silence. They have tested their Falcon 9 first stage on a test stand with two engines. They will soon test three engines and work their way up to the full complement of nine. This is a big rocket and requires a BFTS for testing. Elon Musk claims this stands for Big Falcon Test Stand: that is his story and he is sticking to it.

Development of the Merlin 1C regeneratively cooled engine has been completed. The third Falcon 1 test flight will use this engine instead of the ablatively cooled engine used on the first two test flights. An exact date for the Kwajalein launch has not been announced but it is now scheduled for somewhere in the April-June time frame.

Ground breaking has occurred at SpaceX’s Cape Canaveral site, the former SLC-40 pad , once used for Titan-IV launches.

SpaceX has passed the Critical Design Review (CDR) with NASA on their COTS (Cheap Orbital Transport Systems or Commercial Off The Shelf) contract to perform resupply to Space Station Alpha. By 2010 SpaceX is to demonstrate cargo deliveries using the combination of a Falcon 9 rocket and a Dragon capsule. The Dragon capsule will carry passengers after it has flown a few times.

I could go on. but there is just so much happening at SpaceX I can only recommend you read their update and if you have any questions about the technology, come back here and ask.

But wait! There’s more!

Bigelow Aerospace, which already has two inflatable space station test articles in orbit, is making its move:

Industry sources said Bigelow Aerospace is ready to place an order that includes six launches starting in 2011 to begin assembly and early operation of the new station.

“Those [first] six launches will be comprised of two missions to deploy hardware such as Sundancer itself and our node/bus combination and four missions to dedicated to transporting crew and cargo,” Robert Bigelow, president and founder of Bigelow Aerospace said in a written statement.

“Subsequently our launch rate will double, and we will require a dozen launches, all for crew and cargo transportation missions over the next 12-month period. Our third year of active operations will again require another dozen crew and cargo mission launches and, in our fourth year of operations, we anticipate needing 18 such launches.”

Things are moving so quickly it is just astounding to an old spacer like myself.

The Scientific Method is over-rated

Global warming can mean colder, it can mean drier, it can mean wetter, that’s what we’re dealing with.

– Steven Guilbeault, Greenpeace 2005, as quoted by Canada Free Press

Afterwards, another activist clarified the remark by stating that of course taller can also be evidence of shortness, richer can mean living in poverty, baboons can mean chairs, giraffes can mean pencils and hello Ms. Robinson, your lacy trousers are well buttered with smoked trout, can you hear what I’m writing with my toaster?

Samizdata quote of the day

“One day, there will be a woman worth electing to the White House. But not this one.”

Andrew Sullivan. His observations on the contrast between Senator Clinton, and Margaret Thatcher, are spot-on.

Dim or disingenuous?

Gorgeous pouting Blair babe, Caroline Flint MP, is shocked by her discovery, on becoming housing minister, that 50% of adults in ‘social housing’ (i.e. directly or indirectly state-subsidised rental property) are unemployed. She wants them to be forced to look for work on pain of losing their tenancies.

Leave aside the typical New Labour paternalism (“You! You, there! Do what we think you should do or we will punish you”), it is the apparent incomprehension of the life of the poor from someone who purports to represent their interests , was a trades union research officer for eight years, and has been in parliament for 10. Does she have especially efficient caseworkers who keep her well-insulated? Or is she just grossly innumerate, mimophantic and patronising, even for a member of the political class?

Of course a huge proportion of those in social housing are unemployed. It would be obvious to anyone not in receipt of massive tax-free housing benefits themselves, that if you have small income, then you will live wherever is cheapest. And social housing rents are the cheapest there are, even cheaper especially after housing benefit is applied. Even if you want to sleep on the streets, New Labour has probably tidied you up.

50% of those in social housing are unemployed naturally enough because nearly 100% of people who are unemployed for any length of time are going to end up in social housing as the best deal available to them. And available to them as a priority. I might be tempted to save £250 quid a week and move to the slightly less pretty environment 100 yards away – but it ain’t available to the likes of me. That is true whether their reason for unemployment is idleness, or genuine incapacity, or rational reaction to the benetax system making them worse off taking low-waged work.

Changing those conditions and letting people make a new set of their own choices is unthinkable. In our new age of moralitarianism, you are to be personally monitored, and if not doing whatever is deemed good for you, you shall be personally compelled. A British mutawa, a department for the suppression if vice and promotion of virtue, cannot be far away. The values of non-smoking, non-drinking, sexually orderly, cautious on-line, un-inquisitive, skill-seeking, non-migrant, safety-conscious, nothing-to-hide-nothing-to-fear, pro-social “hard-working families” must be defended against the pollution of those who practice other – a fortiori bad – lifestyles.

The swing voters are on the ends, not in the middle

The swing voters are on the ends, not in the middle. Take a good look at this chart.

vote_chart_01.jpg

Notice that the Democratic voter turnout is a steady trend. Not Ross Perot or Ralph Nader appears to have affected the Democratic base turnout. It looks quite reasonable to interpret that third party candidates do not pick off Democratic voters, but rather people who otherwise would not have voted or would have voted Republican.

On the other hand, look at the Republican voter turnout. During a time when the Democrats went from 37.4 to 44.9 million in a trend that projects in both directions, the Republicans went from 54.5 to 39.1 million. The explanation is a simple one. The Republican party does not have a ‘base’. If they do, it is so small that it is below the radar.

Put another way, Democrats vote for their party come what may. Republicans vote, or very importantly stay home, based on the candidates and their principles, not party loyalty. This comment thread on Rachel Lucas with well over 400 mostly thoughtful comments shows the depth of the division. Even here on Samizdata there are commenters who say things like:

… “true” conservatives piss me off. And if there is one thing I can count on, it’s that McCain will knee them in the nuts when needed. Who the hell do these self righteous ass hats think they are?

My answer? We are individuals. We vote with our mind, not ‘our’ party. And you will not win without us.

I said some time back that the only Republican candidate capable of winning the big race was Thompson. Obviously, I did not make that prediction based on poll numbers naming him as their first choice. I made that prediction based on the poll numbers that did not give him an absolute negative. Well, that and the obvious fact that the swing voters are on the ends, not the middle. Had he been the Republican candidate, a popular majority would almost certainly have found him to be the preferred candidate. No other candidate can avoid the rejection of substantial numbers of voters that the RNC claims are Republicans. Because Republican strategists are forgetting something. Many of ‘their’ voters do not belong to the Republican party. We belong to ourselves. And that is how we vote. If Fred is still on the ballot in your state, it is not too late to vote that way.

And one of the things I really like across the Atlantic is…

…All the wonderful tools of liberty. But… but… I see not a single example of that German-Swiss engineering marvel, the SIG-226, as featured on this blog’s masthead!

Fourth cable cut reported in Middle East

If you are of a conspiracy orientation, you are going to love this report I just picked up off a network admin mail list:

A fourth submarine cable in the middle east was damaged Sunday between Haloul, Qatar and Das, United Arab Emirates.

This is in addition to the damage affecting FLAG, SAE-ME-WE4, FALCON cables.

After reviewing surveillance video of the area, Egypt’s ministry of maritime transportation is reporting no ships were near the FLAG or SAE-ME-WE4 cables 12-hours before or after the cable damage near Alexandria, Egypt. The reason for outage of the cables has not been identified yet.

Did anyone notice the NSA black-ops sub leaving the area (I should add a smiley here… I think)?

More information can be found here. There has also been a suggestion this report may be an ‘echo’ of a previous report caused by mis-communication across language barriers. I have no idea myself.

We now cue the Secret Squirrel theme and search for our tin hats as ‘The Galloping Beaver’ asks: “Where is the USS Jimmy Carter?”

A term I’d like to see rather less of

These things tend to move in cycles, but one expression I think ought to be killed off, deleted, removed, or otherwise expunged from financial affairs is “off-balance sheet”. What this term means, at least according to Wikipedia,, are assets or liabilities that are not recorded on the balance sheet of a company’s accounts but ring-fenced in a separate, legal entity. But in fact what has turned out to be the case is that in the end, these things tend not to be very “off” any balance sheet at all. Take Britain’s private finance initiative (PFI), in which private companies bid to carry out government-funded contracts like building roads or hospitals, operate said facilities for a period of time – like 10 years – and then return them to the State’s control. The government is able to get things built, but, oh so wonderfully, the debt that the government may have to shoulder for the cost of paying for these things is “off-balance” sheet. Marvellous. Many of the banks now mired in the credit crunch ran complex-sounding things called SIVs (structured investment vehicles), which were “off balance sheet”; by using derivatives to insure their debt risks, they also moved a lot of liabilities “off balance sheet”. But in the end, come the economic storms, this will not work. Sooner or later, back to the balance sheet these things must go.

As Ayn Rand might have put it, if you evade the facts of reality, sooner or later they will bite you. That applies to accounting as much as anything else. I wonder if I can move my mortgage or credit card bill “off my balance sheet”. Somehow I don’t see that working out too well.