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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Most readers will know about Detlev Schlichter and his book Paper Money Collapse. Some readers will know about Max Keiser who presents The Keiser Report on Russia Today. Yes, Russia Today. Doesn’t sound good does it?
Well, it is not all bad. Keiser does predict global economic collapse (the non-badness here being that his prediction is (I think) correct). He does blame central banks and their printing of money. He does point out that what we are seeing at the moment is very definitely not capitalism. He does interview a good number of libertarians such as Peter Schiff. And he does advocate the ownership of gold and silver.
But then things start to go downhill again. He forever blames the global situation on “banksters” and their “fraudulent” ways. While apparently being in favour of capitalism he still manages to lambast any attempt to control government spending. The UK coalition government’s austerity programme, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker and the Tea Party have all been criticised by him. He also seems to believe in global warming or to be more accurate: CAGWIT (that’s my new acronym: Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming Inspired Tyranny, by the way). And he interviews a whole bunch of nutters including Keynesians and anti-Israelis.
The other night he interviewed the distinctly non-nutty Detlev Schlichter. The good news is that Schlichter managed to get most of his main points across (now if only he were allowed to do that on the BBC!)…
…The bad news is that during the interview Keiser made his usual remarks about fraud (at about 20:00). And Schlichter said nothing or, at least, nothing in response. Now I appreciate that Schlichter is new to this kind of thing and that he has a book to sell but I think he should have at least said something. To acquiesce while Keiser makes his outrageous claims, to my mind, gives the impression of agreement.
Paul Mason, BBC Newsnight’s economics editor (and the guy who fronted that Keynes v Hayek radio show we’ve blogged about here), picks Detlev Schlichter’s Paper Money Collapse as one of his five economics books to give people for Christmas.
Mason begins his Guardian piece thus:
Two questions predominate in this year’s slew of books on economics. The first is the most obvious: how do we get out of this mess? It’s a question that has set authors along many roads but they all lead to the same destination: a bigger role for the state and the need for renewed international co-operation.
Which, alas, explains why Detlev Schlichter is so pessimistic about good sense prevailing in financial policy before ruin engulfs us all. The world’s rulers have pushed the world slowly but surely into a huge hole, and all that Mason’s authors (aside from Schlichter) can recommend is digging the hole ever deeper.
A “bigger role for the state” is not the solution to the world’s problems just now. That is the problem, and it has been for many decades.
At least Schlichter’s kind of thinking is getting around, and, as this piece by Mason proves, in some somewhat surprising places. Mason may not fully understand Austrian economics to the point of actually agreeing with it, but he does seem (as I said towards the end of this earlier posting) to respect it. He knows it is saying something important.
Schlichter has been unwavering in his pessimism about the world getting “out of this mess” and he is being proved more right with every week that passes. When total ruin does arrive, we can only hope that he and people with similar opinions to his will then be listened to rather more.
“…Journalism is a trade, not a profession; the idea that its practitioners should be licensed, that it should be a closed shop that only people who have passed a test can enter; and that a politically created quango can determine who is “right” and who is “wrong” and should therefore be banned is appalling and dangerous. It is a sure route to eliminating free speech and ensuring that only “approved” views can be aired. These days, there is a continuum between a lone tweeter or blogger with a dozen followers to a star broadcaster who speaks to 10m people every day. One cannot arbitrarily draw a line between journalism and non-journalism any more. All should be protected by free speech; all should be held responsible for what they write or say.”
Allister Heath, talking about the disgusting idea of a UK Labour Party shadow cabinet member to licence journalism. It is important to note – as Samizdata regular Guy Herbert has from a Facebook comment I saw, that the sins of someone like Johann Hari would not have been picked up had he ticked all the right boxes by attending a J-school.
As Brian Micklethwait notes below, it appears the Labour leadership has disowned the idea – so far. You know how it goes: an idea is floated, is immediately rejected by the senior folk, but gradually keeps getting more and more traction.
I cannot overstate my loathing for the political class in this country. Glenn Reynolds says of the US equivalent that it is the worst political class since before the US Civil War (not exactly an encouraging thought). God knows what sort of epoch we can compare this lot to in the UK.
You could live decades in Manhattan and still be surprised by what its vibrant capitalism throws up at you. Last weekend I got an invite to go along to a party that was raising money for some charity cause, although I was not one of the ones there to be a high roller. Let us just say I got in via the journalists back door since one of the celebrity guests was a Fox News personality who was also a friend of my usual Manhattan drinking buddy. It should come as no surprise to long time readers that when in New York I chill with journalists, spacers and the odd Irish musician.
I knew it was going to be interesting before I met up with Taylor Dinerman at the usual media waterhole, but on the some thirty block walk we were lost in discussions about typical fighter pilot behavior with the fair sex, space policy and which foot Paul Krugman is currently inserting. I was expecting something exceptional but when I finally walked over to the railing of the rooftop party I was not quite prepared for a night time view of New York like this. It is really different when you can see the city laid out in front of you in every direction and yet you are close enough to be struck by the full three dimensions. I can hardly imagine what waking up to this every day must be like, but I am glad to know there are people out there who do.
A Northerly view of the Chrysler building and surrounds.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
The party had the standard accoutrements. If you simply looked at the bar man serving drinks from a table by the core wall, or at the disk jockey in the corner, it would look like the standard parties we have all attended. The DJ laid down a modern sound track to insure all would eat, drink, be merry and network till they dropped. I was of course doing just that. I handed out Immortal Data Corporation business cards to all and sundry while keeping up my energy from the passing trays of hors d’oeuvres. I do not think I had a repeat taste all evening.
The disk jockey kept the place rocking, or whatever you call it with dance music.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
Being the spacer that I am, my actual first photograph of the night was the stunning image of a fall moon rising over the East River from a southeasterly direction. A mere photograph cannot come close to what the eye took in. Believe me, this poor small subset of photons does not come close to doing it justice.
The view of the moon was even more amazing in person.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
Later on, after several drinks and much mixing I decided to temporarily break from the crowd, and that was when I discovered the flat was even more spectacular than I had thought. This is where Tony Stark would live if he owned a flat in Manhattan. No doubt about it.
This is not one of Tony Stark’s residences. But it should be.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
Taylor and I mostly talked with media folk, although there were lots of financial types there as well, with some of which we also spoke. I knew Taylor was fluent in French and Hebrew. Tonight I found him talking at length in German to a businessman and doing the occasional phrase in Mandarin. We were also joined by James Taranto of the Wall Street journal after he returned from a quiet far corner where he did a radio show call in to express his opinion of the latest Krugman piece at the New York Times.
One of the more fun people I spoke to was a woman who started her career as an NPR reporter assigned to Belfast. She was there in the seventies, well before my time, but we still had much common knowledge to share as she was a lover of Irish Traditional music and I think it fair to say that a few of my close friends in Ireland can play or sing a note or two of that genre.
I was there with journalist and occasional Samidatista contributor Taylor Dinerman.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
It was a very international crowd, although it is sometimes hard to tell in New York. Someone who you think looks foreign may come out with a strong New York accent when they say hello… or they may speak with a strong accent from some odd corner of the world. You simply cannot tell.
Late in the evening Taylor and I were sipping our drinks and talking Chinese politics with a VP of Tang Dynasty TV, Mike Chen. He is very much the all American himself but is able to travel and mix in China and the three of us were off in a Samizdata like discussion of China’s economy, ethnic strife problems, what happens when the North Korean penny drops, why China is building forces, what sort of aircraft India is buying and why…
I think it rather suitable that drinks in hand, we were looking down upon the United Nations Building from our high capitalist perch.
I have always looked down on the UN as an institution. But from here I really did look down on it.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
Oh, and we had a chance to talk with Rita Cosby, an old friend of Taylor’s from Fox News, before he and I and James went off for our rather late dinner at McFadden’s Bar.
Despite the Corona’s, the wine, the rum and cokes, and the Johnny Walker I had already downed, or perhaps because of them, I decided after my dinner pint of Guinness that I could not let that poor pint feel lonely. So when they headed home, I headed further down Second Avenue to an old hangout of mine. The rest of the night (and pints) is another story and I was off duty as your Samizdata On The Scene reporter.
Slante!
Time was when Ford was the model for corporatism and seen as a template for the State.
But that was before we got to a situation where Communist China’s state media castigates the US federal government for wasting money on welfare programs and over-borrowing.
I like the fact that Ford let Chris choose his own words to explain why he wouldn’t buy a government bail-out car. Very Post-Fordist.
Correction: I mistakenly wrote in an earlier version of this that Hari was being sent on a course at the expense of his employer, but that is not so. He is paying for it himself. I am still not quite sure how this helps: do you need to learn how to be honest? Maybe he should read some books on ethics instead. Anyway, the error was mine.
Reading this comment about the revolting Johann Hari, a journalist who fabricated interviews and, well, basically made stuff up, I am still stunned that he has not been fired by his current employer. Instead, the creep writes a sort of mea culpa and is attending a course to learn about journalism. He should have been fired, in my opinion. There are thousands of talented people trying to make a career in the media; why should this shit be allowed to stay in the business?
Of course, in a free market, he should be able to do what he likes so long as he does so not at my expense, so I would, for example, object if he ever got a job working for the BBC, which is funded by a tax. But this sorry saga does rather suggest that if you are a leftie, self-styled preacher of idealism like Hari, that you can get away with a lot.
Here is a blog, with the beguiling title of Splintered Sunrise, by a man who obviously swings to that side of the political spectrum who is rightly appalled by Hari and his antics.
Sometimes it pays to call a spade a spade. Johann Hari is a conman. End of subject.
Christina Odone, who was on the receiving end of Hari’s behaviour, is unimpressed.
If this lowlife ever resurfaces in journalism, he should be referred to as “Johann Hari, the plagiarist”, in much the same way as Paul Krugman is sometimes dubbed “the former Enron advisor”.
I was reading an article by Janet Daly, whom I rather like even if I do not always agree with (I met her at a Stockholm Network shindig once and found her sharp and charming), in which she excoriates the NYTimes for a risible screed about the recent riots in Britain:
Never likely to be outdone when it comes to Left-liberal sententiousness, the New York Times has produced a corker of a leading article on our very own riots. With a mock-judicious bit of throat-clearing, it begins on a tone of apparently unimpeachable even-handedness: “nothing can justify or excuse the terrifying wave of lawlessness, etc, etc … the perpetrators must be punished, etc, etc.”
But it then lurches into an absurd compounding of the irrelevant and the ill-informed. David Cameron, the paper intones, is “a product of Britain’s upper classes and schools”. (This is scarcely intelligible English: does it mean upper-class schools?) And so, presumably as a consequence of his class-induced ignorance, “he has blamed the looting and burning on a compound of national moral decline, bad parenting and perverse inner-city subculture”.
Yes indeed he has, thus putting himself in agreement with about 90 per cent of the British population. But the New York Times in as uninterested in the overwhelming majority of British public opinion as it is in the great mass of American public opinion. It is as smugly and narrowly orthodox in its Left-liberal posturing as its counterparts in Britain
Good stuff. But what really caught my eye was a comment under this article by a blogger rejoicing in the giggle inducing pseudonym “He’s Spartacus”, which I reproduce entirely here as it is rather splendid:
Comments are pre-moderated at the NYT and I have little doubt that mine will not pass muster, so here it is….
It’s difficult to know where to begin dissecting this flatulent nonsense, it’s so full of holes, so I’ll content myself with saying that the NYT continues to demonstrate that it knows as little about the reality of life in Britain as it does about America.
No….wait….scratch that….
This social disintegration is exactly what clear thinkers have been warning about for more than half a century.
Replace the family with the State, bellow “revolution!” from every street corner while in reality making the banks and corporations you claim to hate yet more powerful because, loath though you may be to admit it, they debt-fund the State’s rent-seeking schemes and social engineering projects, steal our money at gunpoint to pay for it all, ghettoise entire communities by telling them they can develop separately (now where have I heard that before?)….
What were you THINKING?
Reap the whirlwind.
Now for the good news….
The state has failed, and the really good news is that a lot of people have worked this out for themselves, as evidenced by the thousands of ordinary, law-abiding folk who, once they had recovered from initial impact of the sheer cold-bloodedness and randomness of the violence, took responsibility for protecting their own streets and neighbourhoods.
If this spells the beginning of the end of the nanny state, I for one will raise a glass to the state-created bottom-feeders who initiated it.
To which all I can say is… amen to that.
Today I learned, from someone who was involved in the making of it, that:
The Radio 4 bosses liked the Keynes v Hayek debate so much that they are going to repeat it at 9 am on Wednesday 24th August. This sort of thing is very very unusual. This is probably going to add around 1.5 million listeners to the estimated 1 million radio listeners the programme has already had. (I haven’t looked at the podcast stats yet but it was in the iTunes News and Politics top 5 in the UK.)
My own personal reaction to the debate was that a true clash of archetypes was too often, for my taste, dragged off into nitpicking about who said what, when, and just what Keynes would have made of Q(antitative) E(asing), when the real point is that he wouldn’t have started from there. But then again, the show was flagged up as “Keynes v Hayek”, rather than as “Mainstream Economics v Austrian Economics”, so I probably shouldn’t grumble but should instead be counting blessings.
Which are numerous. Far more to the point, the above news makes me think, again, more so, this, which said that we are at least, at last, having this argument, beyond the confines of the Austrian Economics tribe and of the tiny few others who had until recently actually heard of it. Austrianism is now emerging from the great gaggle of alternatives to the present disastrous economic policies to take pride of place, at least in the heads of a great many of those who think seriously about economic policy, as The Leading Contender.
This is, in short, very good news, which puts an interesting slant on the ever ongoing argument about whether and how the BBC is biased.
I think the conclusion of this paragraph by Daniel Johnson is overly gloomy:
“The present hysteria obscures the fact that the most unaccountable power in the British media culture is not News Corp. but the BBC. Funded by a poll tax, driven by a leftist mindset, and ruthless in its use of monopoly power, the BBC has been using its saturation coverage of the phone-hacking story to destroy its main competitor. If the BBC succeeds in its aim of driving News Corp. out of the UK market, the British public will be the losers. There is a real danger that the case for the free market, Judeo-Christian values, and Western civilization will no longer be made in Britain.”
I am not so concerned as Johnson is. If Murdoch did pack it in, leaving a vacumn in the sort of space he has filled, someone else could and would fill it. I think that in the age of the internet and a profusion of blogs and other outlets, that the barriers to entry into the media business have been dramatically lowered.
Like Johnson, I have not joined in the general baying for Murdoch’s blood, sensing that some of those who wanted him done down were looking to strengthen the armlock of the BBC and throw out an upstart who upset their cozy world. (My goodness, he wasn’t even Bwitish!). Other news organisations besides those run by Murdoch have done bad things, and given the weaknesses of any organisations run by human beings, those failings will remain. The best insurance against such abuses is the widest possible array of choice in media so that consumer power dominates. Remember, Murdoch decided to shut down the News of the World when advertisers threatened to pull the plug on him. Subscribers can and did cancel on him. With the BBC licence fee, there is no such way that irate consumers of television can vote with their wallets.
Anyway, here’s another paragraph from Johnson that I liked:
“How precisely the closure of a newspaper serves the cause of liberty, such commentators cannot say, any more than they can justify their implied comparison with the butchers of Tripoli and Damascus of the man who not only gave the British press a new lease of life by defeating the print unions, but also lavished tabloid profits on the upscale Times and the highbrow Times Literary Supplement for over 30 years. The News of the World, though beneath the contempt of today’s pundits, was loved by George Orwell. He begins his great essay “The Decline of the English Murder” by evoking a scene of postprandial bliss: a working-class Englishman following his Sunday lunch of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding by opening the News of the World to read about the latest, most lurid murders.”
On an optimistic note, I’d add that one of the trail-blazers in new media, Glenn Reynolds, marks 10 years of Instapundit today. Well done him. All hail to the King of Knoxville.
Tonight,BBC Radio 4, 8pm:
I’m told that it will sound a lot more coherent than it did on the night it was recorded.
More pre-publicity from the BBC here.
At lunchtime yesterday, the BBC’s Test Match Special radio commentators held a most entertaining Q&A with former top cricket umpire John Holder, who was asked questions like: “If a batsman hits the ball, it hits the batsman at the other end, bounces off the teeth of the bowler onto the wicket and the stricken batsman is still out of his ground, is that batsman run out?” (yes); or: “If the batsman hits the ball into the air, and a bag blows across the ground and the ball goes into the bag, and a fielder catches hold of the bag before anything hits the ground, is the batsman out?” (yes again). “If the batsman hits the ball and it strikes the branches of a tree …?” “If a dog gets on the pitch …?” “If a passing bird of prey catches the ball …?” You get the idea. Ho ho, chuckle chuckle. Holder answered everything with utter confidence. Not once could anyone, as the cricket metaphor goes, stump him.
But, about two hours later, right at the very end of the immediately following session of test cricket between England and India, at Trent Bridge Nottingham, a question of just this complicated kind arose for real.
If a batsman hits the ball towards the boundary, and if the fielder stops the ball going to the boundary, but thinks he failed to stop it, and if the fielder then picks the ball up in a relaxed, casual manner, for all the world making it clear that he thinks it was a four, and if the fielders in the middle of the pitch receive the ball in the manner of people who also think that the ball went for four, but if then, as an afterthought, one of the fielders takes the ball and flicks off the bails, with no sense of celebration, just on the off chance, because the umpires haven’t signalled a four, or said that it’s now tea time, but nevertheless, one of the England batsmen has already concluded that it is tea time, and is walking off the pitch, and is thus out of his ground, the fielder who has removed the bails having appealed in a quietly interrogative rather than exultant manner … is the batsman out? That’s what happened, for real. The umpires asked the Indian captain, Mahendra Singh Dhoni, whether he was withdrawing his appeal. No, said Dhoni. Out, said the umpires. Ian Bell run out 137, off the last ball before tea. Bell bewildered and angry. The England team, and the crowd … not happy.
 Where, the commentators were all saying to one another during their frantic tea interval attempts to explain it all to us listeners, is John Holder when you need him?
But meanwhile, the two Andrews, Flower and Strauss, coach and captain of England, dropped by the Indian dressing room and asked the Indian team if they would withdraw their appeal, and India did. Boos turned to cheers and applause when the umpires (boo!), the Indian team (boo!!), and then … Ian Bell all emerged from the pavilion after the tea break. Hurrah!!!
We now live in an age when all sports fans and all players come to that, rather than just the official salaried commentators and newspaper hacks, can immediately say what is on their (our) minds. This fact may not yet have had very much impact on global politics, the banking system, etc., but it has already changed the atmosphere that surrounds international sport.
So who do I think was right? Were the Indians gents, or suckers? Spirit of the game, or letter of the law? → Continue reading: The run out that wasn’t
The good news: those polars bears killed by “global warming,” were not.
From the AP:
Charles Monnett, an Anchorage-based scientist with the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, or BOEMRE, was told July 18 that he was being put on leave, pending results of an investigation into “integrity issues.”
… observations suggested the bears drowned in rough seas and high winds and “suggest that drowning-related deaths of polar bears may increase in the future if the observed trend of regression of pack ice and/or longer open water periods continues.”
Bad news for some, I reckon.
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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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