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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I could not resist this:
Why did the chicken cross the road?
BARACK OBAMA: The chicken crossed the road because it was time for a change! The chicken wanted change!
JOHN MC CAIN: My friends, that chicken crossed the road because he recognized the need to engage in cooperation and dialogue with all the chickens on the other side of the road.
HILLARY CLINTON: When I was First Lady, I personally helped that little chicken to cross the road. This experience makes me uniquely qualified to ensure – right from Day One! – that every chicken in this country gets the chance it deserves to cross the road. But then, this really isn’t about me.
GEORGE W. BUSH: We don’t really care why the chicken crossed the road.. We just want to know if the chicken is on our side of the road, or not. T he chicken is either against us, or for us. There is no middle ground here. DICK CHENEY: Where’s my gun?
COLIN POWELL: Now to the left of the screen, you can clearly see the satellite image of the chicken crossing the road.
BILL CLINTON: I did not cross the road with that chicken. What is your definition of chicken?
AL GORE: I invented the chicken.
JOHN KERRY: Although I voted to let the chicken cross the road, I am now against it! It was the wrong road to cross, and I was misled about the chicken’s intentions. I am not for it now, and will remain against it.
AL SHARPTON: Why are all the chickens white? We need some black chickens.
DR. PHIL: The problem we have here is that this chicken won’t realize that he must first deal with the problem on this side of the road before it goes after the problem on the other side of the road. What we need to do is help him realize how stupid he’s acting by not taking on his current problems before adding new problems.
OPRAH: Well, I understand that the chicken is having problems, which is why he wants to cross this road so bad. So instead of having the chicken learn from his mistakes and take falls, which is a part of life, I’m going to give this chicken a car so that he can just drive across the road and not live his life like the rest of the chickens
ANDERSON COOPER, CNN: We have reason to believe there is a chicken, but we have not yet been allowed to have access to the other side of the road.
PAT BUCHANAN: To steal the job of a decent, hardworking American.
MARTHA STEWART: No one called me to warn me which way that chicken was going. I had a standing order at the Farmer’s Market to sell my eggs when the price dropped to a certain level. No little bird gave me any insider information.
DR SEUSS: Did the chicken cross the road? Did he cross it with a toad? Yes, the chicken crossed the road, but why it crossed I’ve not been told.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY: To die in the rain, alone.
JERRY FALWELL: Because the chicken was gay! Can’t you people see the plain truth? That’s why they call it the ‘other side.’ Yes, my friends, that chicken is gay. And if you eat that chicken, you will become gay, too. I say we boycott all chickens until we sort out this abomination that the liberal media whitewashes with seemingly harmless phrases like ‘the other side.’ That chicken should not be crossing the road. It’s as plain and as simple as that.
BARBARA WALTERS: Isn’t that interesting ? In a few moments, we will be listening to the chicken tell, for the first time, the heart warming story of how it experienced a serious case of moulting, and went on to accomplish its lifelong dream of crossing the road.
ARISTOTLE: It is the nature of chickens to cross the road.
JOHN LENNON: Imagine all the chickens in the world crossing roads together, in peace.
BILL GATES: I have just released eChicken2008, which will not only cross roads, but will lay eggs, file your important documents, and balance your check book. Internet Explorer is an integral part of eChicken2008. This new platform is much more stable and will never cra.#@&&^(C%……….reboot.
ALBERT EINSTEIN: Did the chicken really cross the road, or did the road move beneath the chicken?
COLONEL SANDERS: Did I miss one?
And someone added SARAH PALIN: I’m not really qualified to answer that question [wink], but I can assure Joe six-pack [wink] and all the hockey moms [wink] out there that I know what really matters to them [wink]. Incidentally [wink], I can see a road from my house, so I must be qualified to cross it…
What caused the economic crises?
“Greedy bankers” says some people.
There is certainly a lot of greed about. For example, the people who trampled a part time Security Guard to death at a Walmart on Long Island (as he shielded a fallen pregnant women from them) were certainly greedy. Even after it was announced they had killed a man they still did not want to give up shopping for bargains in the sale and were very angry at being removed from the store. But I doubt there were any bankers in the Walmart sale crowd – although I am open to being proved wrong.
And the lawyers who are talking about “going after Walmart” over the death are greedy also – they are targeting Walmart, rather than the mob of shoppers, because Walmart has “deep pockets”. But these lawyers are not bankers.
In fact I rather doubt that bankers are either more greedy than other people or more greedy than they used to be. Someone does not tend to go into banking as a vocation – it has always been a “for the money” job. Although (and this may shock people) I suspect a lot of bankers are rather more innocent minded than bankers, at least in Britain, were in the past. Many (although far from all) British bankers in past decades were very aware that banking (as practised in the modern world) was based on very “dodgy” foundations and limited themselves with some care – not out of lack of greed, but because they did not have a university education in progressive ideas of “economics” telling them there was nothing dangerous (for example) in lending out money that was not 100% from real savings – indeed modern bankers are taught, as students, that “savings” and “lending” (or “investment” – as all lending is considered “investment”) are automatically the same whatever they do.
A certain Scotsman (an historian who does not thinks that fractional reserve banking in England came from copying Holland – even though the main bank in Holland, the Bank of Amsterdam, was famous at that time for not being a fractional reserve bank) blames the present crises on “Enron style practices” even though Enron was not a bank, and most of the bankers in trouble have not committed fraud in the way the Enron management did – whether fractional reserve banking is itself fraud is something the Scotsman does not consider.
No doubt some bankers were corrupt. Indeed on the board of Citigroup sat (indeed still sits) the disgusting Robert Rubin – one of the very people who was paid to help Enron cover up its debts, and who was listened to because of his high place in the Clinton Administration. Mr Rubin advised Citigroup to “invest” in securities based, credit bubble pyramid style, on home loans granted to people of whom Citigroup knew nothing – and by this advice and other advice Mr Rubin has helped Citigroup build up two trillion Dollars of “toxic assets”.
Mr Rubin has now secured Citigroup a vast government bailout which will support politically connected shareholders and managers and which has so far allowed Citigroup to go on doing things like paying about half a billion Dollars to name the Mets new baseball field “Citifield” and to pay ten billion Dollars (as of Monday) to buy a road building company in Spain – a country where the construction boom went bust some time ago.
One could then talk about the corruption in the (Democrat dominated) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and their political cooperation with people in Congress (such as Senator Chris Countrywide Dodd and Congressman Barney I-was-just-helping-the-young-boys-out Frank) and the work on the ground of such organizations as ACORN (an alliance of groups specializing in extortion and election fraud, whose most powerful section appears to be in Chicago) and how it used the Communities Reinvestment Act to get banks and other such to make loans to people who could not pay them back – when these people really existed at all.
However, all the above could not have produced the present level of crises… → Continue reading: If this is Capitalism then I am a Communist
Iain Martin is rapidly becoming one of my favourite columnists. This article explains why.
A recent book which looks at tensions between free markets and the short-term interests of incumbent businessmen, this book is great. It was written shortly before the credit crisis went into overdrive and its warnings about a stampede into regulatory overkill are very apt.
I have just returned from a short business trip to Geneva in Switzerland and apart from the usual chatter about the disasters that have befallen the banking system – including such titans as UBS – the chatter in the cafes was about voters’ recent decision to allow heroin to be given to drug addicts in medical centres. Switzerland’s experiments with a more liberal approach to drug use has not been without unfortunate result: I remember that some time ago, there was a park in Zurich that got the unfortunate title, “needle park”, on account of the number of folk who used to congregate there from all over to get their fix of heroin. But perhaps that is a sort of example of how, if you have “public spaces” – owned by the nation and hence owned by no-one in particular – what might be a matter of private behaviour can lead to “negative externalities”. The solution, maybe, is for drug users to indulge their habits on private property with the consent of the owners of said; then the issue ceases to be one on which the polity feels a need to express a view one way or the other.
But the Swiss are nothing if not contradictory and the locals do not seem to share a very coherent conception of what the state can or should be able to tell people to do, but I do sense that there is less of a nanny state culture than in Britain. The locals tell me that there is, still, more of a culture of self-responsibility than in some other European nations. But the contradictions are odd: while approving the heroin measure, Swiss electors rejected a proposal to make marijuana legal and to be able to grow it for personal use. And yet this is a nation where smoking continues to happen in restaurants; firearms ownership is far more liberal than in the UK; ditto things like knives and swords; bank secrecy, while not quite as solid as before, remains; and the nation, to its credit, remains cussedly uninterested in joining the EU or allowing itself to be bullied by tax collectors in places such as Germany and the US.
And the chocolate tastes pretty good as well. Yummm…..
I have still not seen any results from the testing earlier this year, but those results must have been at least passingly interesting, because the Navy is funding further development.
The Bussard Fusion device, the Polywell, uses pure electrostatic containment and has more in common with the old vacuum tube (or valves as they were know over here) than it does with the multi-billion dollar electromagnetic confinement projects most people are familiar with.
It is still far from certain the technology will pan out, but it has gone much further into the the real hardware realm than any other low cost fusion technology to date.
If this device does work, what can we do with it? What impacts do you think a device would have which could produce 10 MW of electricity from a 1.5 meter sphere and (initially) perhaps a truckload of auxiliary gear? Submarines, aircraft carriers, laser cannon power systems, entire towns with self-sufficiency in power, ion engines for outer planet exploration, power for lunar and Mars settlements…
What can you come up with?
Henry Porter, who to his immense credit has been telling it like it is on the civil liberties issue in Britain for several years, has a strong article in the Guardian on the arrest of Damian Green and the government’s miserable behaviour since.
As he puts it, the arrest of one of their own has finally woken MPs up to what is going on. It is hard not to feel a certain bitterness at MPs’ complacency on these issues for many years, but better late than never. The arrest of an MP in such circumstances must count as the ultimate “canary in the coalmine”.
What a way to mark the State Opening of Parliament. At the time of writing I do not know if the Speaker of the House of Commons has been sacked yet or resigned.
But the best answer to the terrorists is to dream bigger, make even more money, and visit Mumbai more than ever. Dream of making a good home for all Mumbaikars, not just the denizens of $500-a-night hotel rooms. Dream not just of Bollywood stars like Aishwarya Rai or Shah Rukh Khan, but of clean running water, humane mass transit, better toilets, a responsive government. Make a killing not in God’s name but in the stock market, and then turn up the forbidden music and dance; work hard and party harder
– Suketu Mehta, author of a splendid book on India’s most wicked and exhilarating city, getting properly to the point, even if asking for a responsive government is getting into “Be careful what you wish for” territory.
The Lakota Sioux have a number of long time libertarian supporters amongst them so I was not totally surprised to hear about the Free Lakota Bank. This new institution is issuing 100% backed currency and supplies many normal banking services.
Unlike the Liberty Dollar effort, the Lakota will not be a pushover for the Statists. As you may remember, the Liberty Dollar facility was invaded and assets stolen by the Feds. The Lakota, on the other hand, have armed warriors for local security and if Statists invade sovereign Indian lands, it would not be the first time they got their arses sent back across the reservation line with tails stuffed up their bungholes.
It is my understanding this effort has the full support of the Free State Project. I hope we will hear more from them in the comments section. I also extend a hearty welcome to anyone associated with the Lakota bank and an invitation to drop in and give us a sales pitch. I would particularly be interested in their privacy practices.
Reason TV has used a brilliantly educational Donald Duck cartoon as a starting point in a video on current monetary problems.
I think it is pitched at just about the right level to educate our politicians about economics. They may be able to print money but they have not yet figured out how to print value.
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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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