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For years, the French and now the Chinese have attempted to emulate the large-scale efforts of the United States to waste as much of their taxpayers’ money as they can in orbit. The vision of a beflagged rocket thrusting into the vacuum is presented as a symbol of national virility.
We British should feel lucky that no government has ever felt the need to put a bloody great big Union Jack on top of a rocket and sling it into orbit. Since the ‘special relationship’ supplied most of the intelligence that the British required, a space policy was unnecessary and was not developed. Indeed, a civil space policy has emerged in recent years at the behest of the Brussels lunatics.
A quick survey, in an article by Taylor Dinerman, a spacepundit in The Space Review, provided a quick survey of contemporary and future developments in British space weaponisation. Possibilities include the potential development of defenses for new satellite capabilities and acquiring space strike capabilities for the RAF. It is clear that,
…this is not a joke. The UK does have a variety of military space systems and is developing more. It is inconceivable that any British government would ever willingly give up its status as a first-rank, medium-sized military power. Thus, they will have to develop a far more sophisticated and comprehensive approach to military operations in orbit than they have up to now.
The most interesting aspect of Dinerman’s conclusions is that the lack of government funding or inspiration in Britain has not prevented the development of a potential infrastructure for space in the UK.
Britain is, indeed, lucky that its entrepreneurial juices have not entirely dried up. Unlike other European states, whose governments have invested massively in space technology and who are struggling to replicate America�s military space infrastructure, the UK has achieved potential military space independence largely through the efforts of small entrepreneurs, such as SSTL�s CEO, Sir Martin Sweeting, and the Starchaser team. It is said that the British Empire was an inadvertent achievement. In the future, it may be said that Britain�s place in space was gained through a similar accident.
The day has been long, too long.
When we were finally released from the offices in the City, we headed for a public house and a pint, a token of commemoration and resistance.
The best way to remember those who are not coming home tonight is to have a drink amongst friends.
Laziness in blogging is defined as examining the attitude of the United Nations or any other NGO in regard to some humanitarian crisis caused by your common garden dictator. Easy and rich pickings. For this particular example, let us take Robert “Gay Gangster” Mugabe as an egregious example of dictatorial excess and the World Food Programme as your normal international bureaucracy.
In reality, “Mad Bob” has ruined his country, urinated on the poor and used food aid as a tool of oppression and death. In UNWorld, Comrade Bob is a welcome member of the international community. As James Morris, ‘United Nations Special Envoy for Humanitarian Affairs for Southern Africa’ (such a big title for an oh-so important man), stated recently:
Mr Morris said the President told him that Zimbabwe welcomed assistance that was purely humanitarian.
“We have had a very positive discussion with President Mugabe. We have had a very good working relationship for several years. The President said he welcomed food assistance that comes with humanitarian commitment,” said Mr Morris.
He said Zimbabwe and the World Food Programme (WFP), a UN agency, had a good working relationship stretching over several years.
Mr Morris knows that this is the case because Comrade Mugabe is committed to agricultural reform.
The UN envoy said it emerged during his talks with Cde Mugabe that the President was committed to the development of agriculture and ensuring food security in Zimbabwe.
“I thank the President for his commitment to agriculture,” said Mr Morris.
The website of the World Food Programme is slightly better (or worse, if you think that a chink of reality can be damned by faint praise). Their “In Brief” on Mr Morris’s visit to Zimbabwe notes many contributing factors, but the state is not given the starring role it deserves:
Food production in Zimbabwe is affected by several factors, including erratic rains, shortages of inputs such as fertilizer and inadequate tillage.
It is also affected by the spread of HIV/AIDS, which commonly afflicts people in their most productive years.
Moreover, the centralized pricing structure for maize in Zimbabwe creates a disincentive for production above subsistence levels.
However, a key reason for food shortages this year will be drought.
The commercial farming sector, which declined as a result of land reform, previously provided an important stabilising factor in maize production, particularly during years of erratic rains, as the crop was mainly produced by irrigation.
While communal farms traditionally produce the greater portion of food, they are largely dependent on rainfall.
This post is the product of laziness or the United Nations is a turkey shoot! Take your pick!
Clive Davis has linked to an interesting, if controversial article, that argues the liberal wing of the blogosphere is now more popular, in terms of pageviews, than the conservative and libertarian community.
The left-wing blogosphere is beginning to decidedly pull away from the right wing blogosphere in terms of traffic. This is largely a result of the open embrace of community blogging on the left and the stagnant, anti-meritorious nature of the right-wing blogosphere that pushes new, emerging voices to the margins.
The article proceeds to describe and examine two different models of political blogging defined by the political orientation of the writers. New entrants into the conservative/libertarian blogosphere have to create their own blogs and rely upon a trickle-down effect, whereas community moderated blogging platforms used by the liberal left appear to reduce the obstacles that a new generation of emergent left bloggers have had to face.
Unless right-wing blogs decide to open up and allow their readers to have a greater voice, I expect that the liberal and progressive blogosphere will continue its unborken twenty-month rise in relative traffic. Conservative bloggers continue to act as though they are simply a supplement to the existing pundit class, without any need to converse with those operating outside of a small social bubble or any need to engage people within the new structure of the public sphere.
Are these valid criticisms? Has the focus upon the reformation of the existing media blinded the conservative and libertarian blogosphere to the need for further change and adaptation as the ‘world of blogs’ continues to develop? Is this part of the blogosphere stagnating?
Dennis McShane, former Minister of Europe, does not appear to have fallen away from the limelight completely, given his recent appearance on Question Time and his subsequent interview for UPI. Cheerleading for Europe with Dimbleby will not tax anyone, but McShane provided some more interesting comments that may cast some light on the current thinking about Europe within the Blair administration, or what backbenchers have to say if they wish to be considered for the next reshuffle.
From the first, McShane makes a point of viewing the French referendum in the faint tones of a realist who accepts a verdict of imprisonment. It is a counsel of acceptance and stoicism, of truth-telling and endeavour; that infamous stranger to the truth, Blairite candour:
“Britain will hold a referendum if there is a treaty to hold a referendum on,” MacShane said. “But a French Non means the new Treaty of Rome cannot be ratified. It was always a mistake to call a Treaty a constitution. But a constitution needs the confidence of the people and powerful, united leadership. Europe lacks confidence and effective leadership today so it was not a propitious time to hold plebiscites on the new Treaty. There may be some who hope this Treaty can be made to fly but it would be an insult to France and her citizens to say the Treaty they reject will continue on as a dead man walking. We will have to begin again.”
The critique proffered is interesting, since it borrows and begs arguments from the Eurosceptics, in order to incorporate them into pro-EU swaddling. McShane recognises the hostility with which the smaller countries attacked the removal of their representation on the Commission and yet, defends the existing Constitution as a “coherent response” to the problems of the European Union. However, the Constitutional answer (to a question that none of Europe’s electorates ever asked) was found wanting. The leaders of Europe could not inspire their voters and the European economy was ruined by:
“… wrong decisions by the European Commission with its obsession on over-regulation and by the failure of the European Central Bank to respond to the economic standstill,” MacShane said. “Political-constitutional advances have to be based on economic and social confidence. ”
The Eurosceptic critique of the project needs to respond to the flanking movement of pro-Europeans like McShane, who borrow their ideas in order to promote different conclusions. Like some grinning, drooling revenant, that refuses to die, unlike the rest of the reactionaries that pass for social democrats these days, the Third Way has been resurrected as an unlikely combination of welfarism, market economics and environmentalism to provide a new moral backbone for coercion in the name of the public good that is Europe.
“The answer will not be found by the gentlemen of Brussels but by the willingness of political actors in Italy, France, Germany, Spain, Britain and the rest of Europe to rethink out-of-date 20th century economic and social ideology. We need a new 3-way historic compromise between economy, society and environment. Unfortunately we only hear the shrill protectionism and rejectionism of those who know how to say No to the future rather than work collaboratively to build a new Europe.”
“I hope this shock will force pro-Europeans to unite and defeat the reactionary forces of the left and right who have unleashed a politics of fear in place of the hope all Europeans need,” McShane added.
It is too early to tell if this forms an altered vision of Europe, one that may appeal to moderates and one nation Tories. By acknowledging its current failures, McShane’s arguments may provide a pleasing lure for those who argue that the European Union can be reformed. It also gives pointers to Blair’s approach in the forthcoming British Presidency of the European Union. As such, the Eurosceptic movement needs to counter conservatives and reformers within the EU, forcefully argueing that such approaches will prove inferior to the development of a free-trading area.
One of the most popular subjects of counterfactual fiction or alternate histories is the outcome of the Second World War, with authors analysing the possibilities of a Nazi victory. This particular type of fiction formed the subject of an article by Gavriel Rosenfeld, an associate professor of history at Fairfield University in Connecticut, in the San Francisco Chronicle.
Such alternate histories engage with the national identities of the United States and Great Britain where the Second World War is represented as the most recent representation of national virtue, a good war, if conflicts can be described as such. Rosenfeld argues that these fictions downplay the impact of the Holocaust and tell of National Socialist regimes that modernise, liberalise or decay, putting their nightmares behind them.
Various factors explain these rosy representations of history as it might have been under Nazi rule.
In some cases, American conservatives’ intensifying fears of Soviet communism and anxieties about American national decline in the post-Vietnam years of the late 1970s and early 1980s helped to challenge the view that an American victory in World War II had actually worked out for the best.
In other cases, the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet dictatorship after 1989 provided an optimistic model for how the Nazi dictatorship might eventually have fared had it triumphed in World War II.
The motives and plausibility of these narratives aside, however, the tendency to view a Nazi wartime victory as a fantasy rather than a nightmare suggests the slow emergence in the United States of a less demonized picture of the Third Reich in American memory.
The downplaying of the Holocaust in many of these accounts, in particular, provides the most telling evidence of this trend and suggests a growing willingness to view Nazism as something less than absolute evil.
The equivalent school within British fiction dwells upon the possibilities of collaboration within an occupied nation, or the lower costs of an isolationist foreign policy.
Rosenfeld criticises these stories for being tendentious and relativist. However, one role of fiction is to explore uncomfortable alternatives and anticipate the movement of National Socialism from memory into history. Perhaps the Holocaust is ignored because these authors do not have the tools or the imagination to grapple with the enormity of the genocide and duck the challenge in their work. Most act as alternate visions of the Cold War, not as a darker age of barbarism.
One novella that conveys the evil is David Brin’s “Thor Meets Captain America”, a useful antidote to the swastika equivalents of glasnost and perestroika.
It is arguable that, despite the radical changes that have transformed the British economy over the last three decades, the political economy underlying the welfare state remains intact. This compact, forged following the swing to the left in 1945, was based upon a universal benefits system, that all members of the national community would benefit from. The postwar Labour government wished to extend the perceived benefits of wartime mobilisation and national solidarity, transforming the People’s War into the People’s Peace. Such was their success that the underlying principles of the welfare state and the National Health Service, ‘from the cradle to the grave’ and free healthcare for all, became defining qualities of the British national identity.
Despite the dismantling of the nationalised industries, the third pillar of the welfare state, and the contraction of the benefits system by linking pensions to prices and the use of mens testing, the underlying principles were maintained. Indeed, they were strengthened by the development of the welfare state into a subsidised service for the professional middle classes, with free health and cheap university education. What the Labour government giveth, the Labour government can taketh away. → Continue reading: Alternative methods of squeezing pips
One of my occasional forays in the United States has washed me up on the shores of historic Provincetown, on the tip of Cape Cod. Looking back over the Atlantic to the West Coast of Ireland has reminded me of how the weather can be just as bad over here as it is at home.
Anti-Americanism remains as popular at home as it is misunderstood here. What was originally considered a prejudice has now transformed into an orthodoxy, where the demonisation of the United States, its people, culture and contributions has acquired the power of an aesthetic reaction. The reaction is not an ideology, although the attacks are structured as such within various contexts, especially as formed by the Left or the Green movement who merge the USA with a wider system of empire, capitalism or oppression. Ideologies tend to wither if they drift too far from reality. Anti-Americanism has acquired the power of an aesthetic, a style derived from its audiences and reproduced from T-shirts of Che Guevara to a new orthodoxy amongst the educated elites. Like left-wing satire of the nineteen-eighties, it has ceased to be funny and its proponents look down on those who disagree with them.
Politics and style are a dangerous combination. Supporting Bush is not the same as accepting America on its terms, good and bad, but orthodox behaviour encourages polarisation in argument. When confronted with an anti-American style that is no longer based upon argument and is winning the culture war, you provide the ‘fishbone statement’ that will make these people choke. To stand up for the Stars and Stripes can be considered a form of private dissent, allowing you to needle those whose views you hate.
Downfall (Der Untergang) proved the perfect foil to the Europe of the Diversities conference, referred to earlier by Johnathan Pearce. This is a controversial film that has excited some who argue that representations of the Nazis which humanise their actions, and detail their suffering, downplay the consequences of the regime. There is weight to this argument, as the film focuses fully on the people within Hitler’s bunker, their loyalty, their duty and their concerns in those final days.
Deftly underscored by Stephan Zacharias’s string-laden soundscape and cinematographer Rainer Klausmann’s truly terrific skill in capturing of the grim reality of the horror that was 1945 Berlin, Hirschbiegel pushes many buttons: the collective guilt of a nation for atrocities committed by their state balanced against the horrific human price of no surrender; the astonishing loyalty of the women around the cold-hearted dictator and the SS who vow to fight on because “we cannot outlive the Fuhrer’s death”; the double standard of being superior but cleansing themselves of traitors and the imperfect until there’s no leadership left to carry the torch.
Although Friedrich Hayek argued that totalitarian regimes allowed thugs and psychopaths to enter positions of authority, this film shows that traditional values of honour and duty were perverted and strengthened by the Nazis. In the film, it is Prussian values which sustain the dying regime, bring the Hitler Youth onto the streets and motivate the soldiers.
One should watch Shoah prior to this, as an inoculation, since one must make a conscious effort to recollect the camps in order to avoid feeling any empathy with these monsters.
UPDATE: For those who thought my link to a revisionist website was too obscure a warning signal that these memes still exist, here is an interview with Lanzmann, the director of Shoah, explaining the reasons why his work must exist.
There is a question concerning the relationship between guns and gangsterism that bedevils third world countries but the control of arms sounds suspiciously like that other ‘success story’: the war on drugs. Jack Straw’s keen attempt to follow the NGOs on this matter was publicised at a press conference today where he attempted to internationalise this issue through an “arms control” treaty. It is not surprising that this immoral act is perpetrated by the Blair administration: a clique that is unable to understand the simple connection between the rule of law and a well armed citizenry.
Straw argued that existing treaties covering chemical, biological and nuclear weapons should be matched by a new treaty covering smaller weapons. And he acknowledged that such weapons “account for far more misery and destruction across the world”. “The new treaty needs to include a wide range of signatories, including the world’s major arms exporters,” he said. “I certainly do not underestimate the difficulties of that. Many nations are concerned that a new arms trade treaty may restrict their defence industries; constrain their foreign policy; and lead to constant legal challenge of export licence decisions. Their approach may initially be one of scepticism, at best. “But in order for it to work properly, a new arms control treaty will need to include as many of the world’s nations as possible – especially those with strong defence industries of their own.
T
he NGO campaign for this solution stems from the revolutionary liberalism redolent of Enlightenment manure. Instead of undertaking the patient steps of building stable laws in these territories and defending property, these organisations prefer to build a bureaucratic edifice of controls, inspections and treaties, a job creation scheme for peace studies graduates.
The Control Arms Campaign is co-ordinated by Oxfam and Amnesty International. They view the proliferation of firearms as a key threat to peace and security. They are right in that technology has lowered the cost of owning firearms and has allowed the strong to plunder the weak; governments or gangs to maim, murder and steal. (although the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 did not require firearms, just edged weapons).
However, their solution is old-fashioned, insensitive to local conditions, and designed to reinforce the status quo in many states, rotten as they are. Their solution is global arms control:
Governments must introduce new laws and measures to incorporate the principles of the Arms Trade Treaty. They must also close the loopholes in their arms controls so that they can strictly monitor end use and effectively control arms brokers and licenced production overseas. They must stop the misuse of arms by security services and introduce systems of accountability and training for them, introduce measures for disarmament when a conflict has ended, develop good justice systems for prosecuting those who misuse arms, enforce all arms control legislation and develop and implement a national action plan to address and solve the country’s arms problems.
Communities and local authorities must help collect and destroy surplus and illegal weapons, introduce community education programs to end cultures of violence, provide assistance to victims of armed violence, and provide alternative livelihoods for those who depend on violence for a living.
Only the police are considered suitable to carry guns in protection of communities if they follow the requisite standards, set down by the United Nations:
International standards do exist to control the use of guns and other methods of force by police and other law enforcement officials, but in many countries they are not being followed.These standards centre on the UN Code of Conduct for Law Enforcement Officials and the UN Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms by Law Enforcement Officials. At their heart is the principle of what constitutes legitimate force. Police must sometimes be permitted to use force or lethal force, in order to do their job of keeping communities safe and protecting themselves and the public from life-threatening attacks. But the force used must not be arbitrary; it must be proportionate, necessary and lawful. And, crucially, it must only be used in self defence or against the imminent threat of death or serious injury.
Self defence for the private individual in defence of life, liberty and property is not included within this ‘solution’.
Sometimes, new clusters of immigrants coalesce in London, under the radar of the media, until such time as a whimpering hack from the Review section of some unreadable broadsheet notices that an article provides local colour or anthropological observations, depending upon their political bent.
Whilst at Smart Alec’s in Wimbledon, enjoying a late pint (though disappointed by the fact that Winterwarmer, a fine drink, was no longer on tap as its replacement, Waggledance, is less refined), I started to notice that the entire bar was filled with white immigrants from Zimbabwe, attending a birthday do.
There is no evidence for the length of time that this community has been established or how large it is. Moreover, Googling does not provide any documents for this phenomenon. However, over the last few years, Zimbabweans, many of them thrown off their farms, have travelled to London and set up shop in Wimbledon. The numbers are sufficient for the community to have acquired its own name amongst travellers from the southern hemisphere, Zimbledon.
How many other communities are gradually emerging amongst the suburbs, unnoticed and unlooked for? Does anyone know where the Berbers, the Bugandans or the Shona drink? What are their names for London?
If anything is evident it should be that, while nations might abide by formal rules on which they have agreed, they will never submit to the direction which international economic planning involves – that while they may agree on the rules of the game, they will never agree on the order of preference in which the rank of their own needs and the rate at which they are allowed to advance is fixed by majority vote. Even if, at first, the peoples should, under some illusion about the meaning of such proposals, agree to transfer such powers to an international authority, they would soon find out that what they have delegated is not merely a technical task, but the most comprehensive power over their very lives.
Hayek ‘The Road to Serfdom’ (Routledge edition: Page 236)
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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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