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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While researching for my weekly CNE Environment column I came across a barking mad website. This led me to another loony story. Unfortunately, neither of these would do for an environment column that is meant to present a credible analysis of the eco-fascist movement.
So I ended up with this story from the French TV station TF1. In what has to be the most perfect economic suicide note since the 1920 Soviet Constitution, the French National Assembly has voted to amend the French constitution so as to enshrine the precautionary principle by 328 votes to 10. This could make any future government decision to deregulate anything illegal.
It is a shame that the precautionary principle is not applied to government regulation: in the absence of any overwhelming proof that it will work, such regulation ought to be prohibited. One might expect such lunacy in the French Assembly to be supported by the extreme left and the Green parties (there are several of these in France). But no.
The “centre-right” parties of the UMP and the UDF voted in favour, the Socialists and the Communists abstained, and the Greens voted against.
If this was appeasement, it failed. So which story was the barmiest?
If reading about the failing of Robert Fisk and being hunted in a pub by ‘peace’ activist harridans if your cup of tea (it certainly is mine), then you could do worse than read the compelling and pleasingly off-beat Blog Irish:
Having exhausted her ignorance on the subject of Eamo, she suggested that we discuss the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. We suggested that after five pints that was probably not a good idea.
With no further ado, she started screeching at the top of her lungs at us. We walked to the other end of the pub, and she followed, still screeching. The pub patrons and staff took no notice whatsoever. She left, and returned five minutes later with five angry women who were apparently going to show us the error of our ways. They searched through the pub, and though we were sitting near the entrance, affected not to see us, and left.
It is a funny old world.
One of my two favourite when-I-want-something-stupid websites, b3ta.com, links to this page of mailboxes, of which this one will undoubtedly be the favourite here. In England this would be forbidden, because it would be a replica gun:
The caption at the bottom of this picture says: ONLY IN TEXAS.
They also link to this, another for our triumphs of capitalism series, a machine for instantaneously peeling hard boiled eggs. This is a truly amazing machine. It is as if the hen is laying the eggs ready peeled. Although maybe that would be rather a bad idea, so forget that please.
Earlier in the week they linked to a fine piece of erotic dancing. Americans who worship our Tony, do not click here.
My other favourite mad stuff website is of course this one. Are there other such places I could visit for similar internet fun? Surely there are. Commenters, educate me.
English weather is talked about, by the English, a lot. This is because if is caused by about nine different things, such as the Gulf Stream, the North Sea, the Arctic, and several other things of equal importance. It can change at any moment. How they forecaste it, I will never know, but they seem to be able to.
Take today. A fortnight ago, Summer had arrived. Then it got colder and wetter again. Then it brightened up, and yesterday, Michael Jennings was being congratulated for bringing the fine weather with him back from Australia. (Welcome back Michael.) That was Sunday. On Monday, Philip Chaston was back to bemoaning the bad again weather.
This morning was even worse. Windy, wet, horrid, and poor windswept me had business elsewhere in London in the morning. When my event began, men were forlornly standing about in their drenched summer clothes. At lunchtime, my business concluded, I waited in a second hand CD shop for the rain, which had suddenly got far worse, to calm down. When it did, and I ventured out, and it then started severely raining again, I scurried to the nearest tube station, and journeyed to my local station, Pimlico. What I found when I emerged from that was something else again.
I found this:
I know what you are thinking. A tree, confused by the early summer sunshine, has blossomed, but then, shaken to its roots by the mad May breezes, it has shed its plumage and been given a good February-style soaking.
But look again at that “blossom”. When I first saw it, on the steps of the station, I of course could see that it was not blossom, and I thought: snow. But actually, it was hail. The hardest, most spherical, most peculiar hailstones I have ever seen in my life. They were perfectly spherical, and looked more like bits of polystyrene than anything natural.
I spent the next twenty minutes snapping artistic type photos of this hail with my Canon A70. In photography circles you are nobody until you have taken close-up, shiny droplet photos of all the various things that water does, when it lands on strange surfaces. So I snapped away at car roofs from close up, hoping that the results would resemble Abstract Expressionism.
The hail stones were not especially big, in fact they were quite small. But having been frozen with great ferocity, presumably at some extraordinary altitude, they appeared impervious to the ground temperature. They floated about in clumps, in puddles, melting not at all. Had my batteries not run out I could probably have carried on snapping away at them for the next hour.
The Dissident Frogman, with whom I discussed this English habit of weather talk only yesterday, said that, yes, in France, if it starts raining, it is liable to rain for the next three days, so there is nothing to be said. In England, you just never know from one hour to the next what the weather will do. Or when. I like it.
There is no political or philosophical message here, just English talk about the weather. But what I most like about stuff like this is that everything interesting to look at is now a photo-opportunity. That I really like. Well done my Canon A70.
It’s May Day Bank Holiday and the traditional British weather is gripping the South-East. Any hope of heading down the coast for a jolly boys’ ended with the incessant rain. Who would fancy pitch and putt in the wet.
Confined to the lounge with the Daily Mail, my eyes lit upon a quote from a politically correct employee of the BBC, in an article on how British citizens, formerly from East-Central Europe, viewed this country:
The British are intrinsically opposed to bureaucracy. A new car can be registered without visiting a government office – still unthinkable in Eastern Europe.
Having experienced communist rule first-hand, I was surprised to hear some educated people in Britain advocating socialism and never asking themselves why that ‘paradise’ needed barbed wire to keep people in.
Uttered by Andrius Uzkalnis, of Lithuania, who works for the BBC World Service.
Besides this, does anyone know what music is worth listening to whilst staring out of the window at the monotony of rain and wishing for sunnier days?
The thing I really like and admire about capitalism is its attention to detail, made possible by the division of labour. While we Samizdatistas get sucked into Political Class worries – like the EU and the Iraq War, overpopulation, underpopulation, etc. – capitalism continues to crank out solutions to problems so small that they can actually to be solved. Someone, somewhere (actually: Canada!), instead of worrying about the Iraq War (over which, he probably decided, he had no influence), has instead been worrying about bananas and how to guard them.
Consider this problem:
Are you fed up with bringing bananas to work or school only to find them bruised and squashed? …
I know I am. I have lost count of the number of times I have done damage to a bagful of Important Things, as a result of a neglected banana at the bottom of everything which I put there three days ago and then forgot about. But what to do? Bananas taste nice. You never know when a banana in your bag might come in handy.
So how do you stop it being crushed and becoming a sticky, destructive mess, dangerous to everything around it? Well, when a capitalist asks an arkward question like the one above, you just know that he will very soon start in on the answer, and this capitalist is no different:
… Our unique, patented device allows for the safe transport and storage of individual bananas letting you enjoy perfect bananas anytime, anywhere.
A perfect banana. Tell me more.
The Banana Guard was specially designed to fit the vast majority of bananas. Its other features include multiple small perforations to facilitate ventilation thereby preventing premature ripening and a sturdy locking mechanism to keep the Banana Guard closed. The Banana Guard is of course dishwasher safe for easy cleaning.
Of course. Small perforations. There goes that attention to detail.
You can get your Banana Guard in an impressive range of colours, namely: Ravishing Red, Outrageous Orange, Mellow Yellow, Sublime Green, Skyhigh Blue, Brilliant Blue, Passionate Purple, Pretty in Pink, and Glow in the Dark.
My thanks to this Monkey.
There is a fuss going on in the USA over something called Air America Radio, a pro-Democrat talk-radio project. The shows have been taken off the air in Chicago and Los Angeles last week amidst a row over payments arrears.
This review published before the furore of Air America Radio is from Press Action, a bunch of US libertarians of the leftist sort. It had me in stitches.
It seems that the predominently white radio presenters have shoved off the air the black presenters in New York, when the majority of the audience is black. As a result the cricket scores and news from the Caribbean are being shunted off to slots between midnight and 5am, to the dismay of many Jamaican listeners.
Also one show involved the presenter screaming and ranting at Ralph Nader, who promptly dubbed the radio station “Hot Air America Radio”. Great job of unifying the comrades, Comrade.
I also noted that the Press Action crowd would elect Noam Chomsky for president on their site poll. The funny bit is that Bush gets 13 per cent and Kerry gets 19 per cent. If Bush gets 13 per cent of the goofy left vote, I must call my bookie.
As I recall, Air America was the name of a CIA spook job in South East Asia during the Viewnam War. Anyone thinking what I’m thinking?
Devoid of inspiration, I looked in my library and found Soviet Communism – A New Civilisation by Sidney and Beatrice Webb. There is no question mark in the title of my 1937 Left Book Club edition, and it was “NOT FOR SALE TO THE PUBLIC” (as it says on the front). And a good thing too, I muttered, as I scanned through it, looking for something particularly vile and wrong-headed for you people to have a good chuckle and a good sneer at.
Imagine my surprise, then, to encounter a paragraph of complete truth. Admittedly I had to go to page 1122 to find it, but even so, don’t you think that this is really rather good?
We place first in far-reaching importance the complete discarding, as the incentive to production, of the very mainspring of the western social order, the motive of profit-making. Instead of admiring those who successfully purchase commodities in order to sell them again at a higher price (whether as merchant or trader, wholesale dealer or retailer). Soviet Communism punishes such persons as criminals, guilty of the crime of “speculation”. Instead of rewarding or honouring those (the capitalist employers or entrepreneurs) who engage others at wages in order to make a profit out of the product of their labour, Soviet Communism punishes them as criminals, guilty, irrespective of the amount of the wages that they pay, of the crime of “exploitation”. It would be difficult to exaggerate the difference that this one change in ideology (in current views of morality as well as in criminal law) has made in the manner of life within the USSR. No one can adequately realise, without a wide study of the facts of soviet life, what this fundamental transformation of economic relationships has meant, alike to the vast majority of the poor and to the relatively small minority who formerly “lived by owning”, or by employing others for profit.
The paragraphs that follow revert to the evil drivel of which this book mostly consists, as the elderly dupes try to explain how none of this did any harm. But even so, something of a surprise.
 Perry’s tinfoil hat was off for repairs, so he had to improvise.
HM Tax Collectors are burning out, cracking up and breaking down. They cannot take it anymore. They can not eat, they can not sleep and they do not know which way to turn.
THEY NEED HELP!!!
If your tax affairs are driving you to despair, spare a thought for the Inland Revenue. It has been forced to call in the Samaritans to help to train staff driven close to the edge by dealing with irate callers struggling with the tax system.
The charity, vastly experienced in helping people who are depressed or on the verge of suicide, has been hired to train around 2,000 Revenue staff who take calls from the public.
The idea is to enable them to be more empathetic when dealing with taxpayers who have reached the end of their tether after trying to understand the shambolic tax credits system or fathom out their self-assessment form.
Or maybe it is taxpayers that are melting down? Or is it both? Who can tell? We are all going crazy round here.
Emotional training is not cheap. The Samaritans normally charge £1,500 a day for this service; it would not disclose yesterday how much the Revenue was being charged.
The ‘revenue’ is not paying a penny. Somebody better get on the telephone to those untethered taxpayers and tell them the bad news. It is all their fault anyway. Then they will get even more angry and the Revenue staff will get even more stressed and then they will need even more therapy and… How deep does this rabbit-hole go?
Perhaps the problem could be alleviated by sending the entire staff of the Inland Revenue off on a holiday… for a few years!
This has no connection with legalising drugs, abolishing income tax (see posting below) or the Samizdata.net metacontext, or no connection that I can now think of. But even so, I like it a lot:
Researchers have cracked the puzzle of how pigeons find their way home: they just follow the main roads.
…
Some pigeons stick so rigidly to the roads that they even fly round roundabouts before choosing the exit to lead them back to their lofts.
Animal behaviouralists at Oxford University are stunned by their findings, which follow 10 years of research into homing pigeons. For the last 18 months they have used the latest global-positioning technology, allowing them to track the ground the birds covered to within one to four metres.
I too am stunned, even though I am not an “animal behaviouralist”. Apparently pigeons do have an innate navigation system, but as soon as they identify a road-based route, they use that instead.
“Up until now, we have always thought about the way that birds go in terms of the energetics of the flight efficiency, which is the most direct route home … as in the phrase ‘as the crow flies’.
“But the answer is, they don’t go as the crow flies, and neither, it is my hunch, do crows. …”
No mate. Crows use the latest global-positioning technology.
There used to be a time when companies has serious names. Standard Oil. East India Company. Marks & Spencer. Ford Motor Company. Western Union. General Electric. Blohm und Voss. Consolidated Engineering.
Now companies have names like Eat My Handbag Bitch.
Perhaps the commentariat knows of some other interesting examples? God bless post-modern capitalism!
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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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