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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Global warming takes a snow day

· Science & Technology

An attempt by two men from northern Minnesota to cross the Arctic Ocean to call attention to global warming ended this morning because of poor weather conditions.

Lonnie Dupre, 43, and Eric Larsen, 33, were forced to abandon their planned 100-day, 1,200-mile trek after encountering unexpectedly heavy snow storms, strong winds and unusual ice conditions, according to Jane Kochersperger, a media officer with the environmental group Greenpeace, which co-sponsored the trip.

Some things just speak for themselves.

June 3rd, 2005 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)

Another blow against the EU

· European Union

Good on the Dutch.

Dutch voters overwhelmingly rejected the European constitution in a referendum Wednesday, exit polls projected, in what could be a knockout blow for the charter roundly defeated just days ago by France.

An exit poll projection broadcast by state-financed NOS television said the referendum failed by a vote of 63 percent to 37 percent. The turnout was 62 percent, exceeding all expectations, the broadcaster said.

Although the referendum was consultative, the high turnout and the decisive margin left no room for the Dutch parliament to turn its back on the people’s verdict. The parliament meets Thursday to discuss the results.

June 1st, 2005 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)

Good ruling

· Civil liberty, Law & Regulation · North American affairs

The US Supreme Court today overturned the obstruction of justice conviction of the Arthur Andersen accounting firm. This comes too late, of course, to save Andersen, which was largely destroyed by the conviction, but it nonetheless injects some common sense back into the rules around withholding information from the government (it can be legal, you know, a fact which the SCOTUS felt the feds needed to be reminded of) and document disposal (a topic on which I spend far too much of my time).

In a unanimous opinion, justices said the former Big Five accounting firm’s June 2002 obstruction-of-justice conviction – which virtually destroyed Andersen – was improper. The decision said jury instructions at trial were too vague and broad for jurors to determine correctly whether Andersen obstructed justice.

. . .

[I]n his opinion, Rehnquist noted that it is not necessarily wrong for companies to instruct employees to destroy documents, even if the intent is in part to keep information from the government.

Like a mother who advises a son to invoke his right against compelled self-incrimination out of fear he might be convicted, “persuading” an employee to withhold information is not “inherently malign,” Rehnquist wrote.

“The instructions also diluted the meaning of ‘corruptly’ so that it covered innocent conduct,” Rehnquist said.

The Andersen case was of a piece, really, with Martha Stewart’s conviction. Both were convicted, essentially, of failing to cooperate in their own prosecution. Give Martha cred for serving her time, but I wonder if she wouldn’t have won out on appeal. Eventually.

May 31st, 2005 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)

Fraud and political correctness

· UK affairs

Delightful vignette from the always fascinating Theodore Dalrymple:

The fact is that people who commit fraud, at least on a large scale, have lively, intelligent minds. I usually end up admiring them, despite myself. My last encounter was with a man who defrauded the government of $38,000,000 of value added tax. I am afraid that I laughed. After all, he had merely united customers with cheap goods. Unfortunately for him, he had been lifted from his tropical paradise hideaway by helicopter and then extradited. By the time I met him, though, his sentence was almost over. He had discovered Wittgenstein in prison.

“Did you have to pay the money back?” I asked.

“No,” he replied, “though I would have had a shorter sentence if I had.”

He had calculated that an extra two years as a guest of Her Majesty was worth it. I shook his hand, as a man who was unafraid: I could do no other.

This is merely the appetizer, though, for a delightful tale of literary “fraud.” Tantalizing you with an excerpt might spoil the fun, so I will simply urge you to, as the man says, read the whole thing.

May 21st, 2005 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)

Knife artist

· UK affairs

Christopher Hitchens has to be one of the premier knife artists currently working in the English language. Can’t say I’m that big a fan of his post-mortem assaults on Catholic luminaries, but when he lights up a political celebrity, well, its all good.

Indeed, he was a type well known in the Labour movement. Prolier than thou, and ostentatiously radical, but a bit too fond of the cigars and limos and always looking a bit odd in a suit that was slightly too expensive. By turns aggressive and unctuous, either at your feet or at your throat; a bit of a backslapper, nothing’s too good for the working class: what the English call a “wide boy.”

TO THIS DAY, George Galloway defiantly insists, as he did before the senators, that he has “never seen a barrel of oil, owned one, bought one, sold one, and neither has anybody on my behalf.” As a Clintonian defense this has its admirable points: I myself have never seen a kilowatt, but I know that a barrel is also a unit and not an entity. For the rest, his defense would be more impressive if it answered any charge that has actually been made. Galloway is not supposed by anyone to have been an oil trader. He is asked, simply, to say what he knows about his chief fundraiser, nominee, and crony. And when asked this, he flatly declines to answer. We are therefore invited by him to assume that, having earlier acquired a justified reputation for loose bookkeeping in respect of “charities,” he switched sides in Iraq, attached himself to a regime known for giving and receiving bribes, appointed a notorious middleman as his envoy, kept company with the corrupt inner circle of the Baath party, helped organize a vigorous campaign to retain that party in power, and was not a penny piece the better off for it. I think I believe this as readily as any other reasonable and objective person would. If you wish to pursue the matter with Galloway himself, you will have to find the unlisted number for his villa in Portugal.

Hitch gets in a few licks on our own torpid Senate as well, and is pleased to report being characterized by George Galloway as a “drink-sodden ex-Trotskyist popinjay”. Worth the read.

We certainly have our fair share of odious idiots, craven lickspittles, and oleaginous opportunists here in the States, but is there, anywhere in the Anglosphere, a worse human being than George Galloway?

May 21st, 2005 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)

Anti-tranzi rant, tsunami variation

· International affairs

I confess that I didn’t give any money to the tsunami relief effort, mostly because it became apparent to me within a few days that there was far more aid on its way to the area than could possibly be put to good use. I prefer that my donations go where they can make a difference.

Mark Steyn confirms that I was right not to waste my money (or rather, to give my money to the tranzis to waste).

Five hundred containers, representing one-quarter of all aid sent to Sri Lanka since the tsunami hit on Dec. 26, are still sitting on the dock in Colombo, unclaimed or unprocessed.

At the Indonesian port of Medan, 1,500 containers of aid are still sitting on the dock.

Four months ago, did you chip in to the tsunami relief effort? Did your company? A Scottish subsidiary of the Body Shop donated a 40-foot container of “Lemon Squidgit” and other premium soap, which arrived at Medan in January and has languished there ever since because of “incomplete paperwork,” according to Indonesian customs officials.

It was apparent to me that the US and Aussie military were doing everything possible to ensure that casualties would be minimized during the immediate crisis. Since long-term relief was being farmed out to the UN, and no fundamental reforms of either the UN or the countries receiving it were contemplated, well, the outcome and effectiveness of the long-term relief program was pretty predictable. The UN was being put in charge, so I sent my charity dollars elsewhere.

When rent-a-quote senators claim to be pro-U.N. or multilateralist, the tsunami operation is what they have in mind — that when something bad happens the United States should commit to working through the approved transnational bureaucracies and throw even more “resources” at them, even though nothing will happen (Sri Lanka), millions will be stolen (Oil for Food), children will get raped (U.N. peacekeeping operations) and hundreds of thousands will die (Sudan).

May 15th, 2005 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)

Cool interweb stuff

· How very odd!

An assortment of cool web stuff* encountered in recent days:

Most excellent puppeteering in General Electric’s Facing That Void.

Fun CG animation ride. (warning:contains computer simulated amphibian genitalia)

I can’t remember a purer shot of joy than this Kokonono promo.

*Don’t even waste your time over a dial-up – this is all broadband stuff. Thanks to our rather disturbed friends at Screenhead, BTW.

May 14th, 2005 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)

Taxation and theft

· Slogans & Quotations

A nice analogy from the inestimable Tim Blair, posting temporarily on Tim Dunlop’s blog due to an outage at his own.

High-income earners pay a higher rate of tax than people on low incomes. So why is it unfair, as Kim Beazley argues, that high-income earners receive a larger tax cut?

An analogy: your house and your neighbour’s house are both burgled. You lose a television. He loses a DVD player, microwave, his collection of Chomsky memorabilia (it’s an inner-city house), and a unique framed Leunig depicting Mr Curly’s pedophilia arrest. Would it be unfair if police were to return all of this fellow’s belongings, and you were only to get back your 24-inch Sony?

May 12th, 2005 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)

Still more Republican-bashing

· North American affairs

I just can’t help myself, it seems. I suppose my attitude towards Dems suffers from the soft bigotry of low expectations, – I really don’t expect any better from them. For the Reps, well, they have been marginally better than the Dems on liberty issues, but whatever principled commitment they had to Constitutional limited government is apparently no match for the strong solvent of controlling the unitary state.

This time, really, a nice even-handed non-partisan bashing that indicts both Dems and Reps on federalism. I happen to think that dispersed power is one of the most critical bulwarks for freedom in any society, and one to which many seem oblivious to. The column details the ways in which the dispersion of government power in the US has been destroyed by both Dems and Reps.

Since the Great Society delusions of President Lyndon B. Johnson, Democrats have assumed the powers of Congress are unlimited absent an express constitutional prohibition. The assumption turned the Constitution on its head. It evoked stentorian pledges from Republicans to honor traditional state prerogatives and to restore the Founding Fathers’ design of a limited federal government, not a Leviathan. But after capturing control of Congress and the White House, Republicans are bettering the instruction of Democrats in pulverizing federalism. The pledges of change proved hollow, like a munificent bequest in a pauper’s will, to borrow from Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson.

The US Constitution successful in preserving individual freedom as long as it did in large part because it dispersed power so widely among and between the state and national governments, the governments and the people, and between the branches of the national government. That dispersion is at an end, and with it is born the unitary totalising state that is, and always has been, the bane of individual freedom.

One side note – the article actually does a decent job of capturing the embryonic “new federalism” jurisprudence of the Supreme Court, but any Court that will uphold an abomination like the McCain-Feingold political speech controls offers faint hope indeed to libertarians.

May 10th, 2005 | Comments are closed

More Republican-bashing

· North American affairs

Just another stone in the bucket:

The Republican promise of smaller, less-intrusive government is getting harder and harder to believe. Especially when a more plausible plot line is unfolding every day: that the GOP has put aside the ideals of Reagan and Goldwater in order to pursue a political strategy based on big spending.

It’s not always easy to see how radically Bush has transformed the GOP — from Reagan’s admonition that “government is the problem” to Dubya’s own assertion that “when somebody hurts, government has got to move.” But it’s a real transformation — and an expensive one.

I have never been a big fan of GW Bush’s domestic policies, although the primary complaint from the loyal oppo has generally been along the lines that he isn’t a big enough spender/regulator. Still, the refrain that “But Kerry would have been worse” is starting to wear a little thin.

Between the Rovian big spenders and the prudish blue-noses pushing their own nanny state, the Republican Party’s status as a better home for libertarians than the Democrats is getting more and more dubious. Truly, libertarians are being cast into the wilderness, with their only company a smattering of gibbering anchorite “true believers” and associated hucksters. Why, its getting almost as bad in the US as it seems to be in Britain!

May 9th, 2005 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)

Republicans are fools

· North American affairs

In what is almost certain to become a long-running series devoted to the topic, let us now note one of the ways in which the Republicans are fools:

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, like his immediate predecessor, John Ashcroft, has pledged to make obscenity prosecutions a priority. The department is expected to announce soon the creation of a special unit within its criminal division to focus on adult obscenity cases.

Surely no additional comment is needed, but let us note that there are apparently federal laws against obscenity in spite of a rather clear and unqualified statement in the Constitution of the United State to the effect that “Congress shall make no law… , ” so let us pause a moment to lob a brickbat or two at the apparently illiterate Justices of the Supreme Court who have upheld such laws.

May 5th, 2005 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)

Spin patrol

· North American affairs

I frankly haven’t been paying much attention to President Bush’s Social Security reform, ehrm, thingie (hard to call it a proposal because I don’t think he’s really proposed anything concrete), but I gather that the spineless wimps in Congress are coalescing like a school of jellyfish around a “bipartisan” proposal to raise the hell out of taxes and do absolutely nothing to create private ownership. Sounds like I, personally, can look forward to paying several thousand dollars more per year to support Social Security.

Business as usual in Washington. Just think how much worse it would be if John Kerry had won! (Sadly, I’m not sure if I mean that ironically or not.)

In the relentless, frantic spinning that passes for political discourse among our anointed masters, though, the frothing anti-Bushie Paul Krugman sets a new high. Krugman frantically lets us know that under Bush’s latest Social Security thingie “the average worker–average pay now is $37,000–retiring in 2075 would face a cut equal to 10 percent of pre-retirement income.”

That’s right, folks – we should swat down whatever the evil Chimpler McBushiburton proposed because it might cause people who aren’t even born yet to take a 10% reduction in income when they quit working for their money.

May 4th, 2005 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
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