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The next time one of you says that "The so-called war against Al Qaeda has got nothing to do with us in the United Kingdom, we must just leave the Yanks to sort out their own problems", please wait a moment while I read the following list of British names to you:

Neil Bowler
Jon Ellwood
Ian Findley
Marc Gajardo
Paul Hussey
David Kent
Peter Record
Chris Redman
Clive Walton
Douglas Warner
Tim Arnold
John Beaumont
Daniel Braden
Chris Bradford
Matthew Chappell
Rachael Edwards
Lucy Empson
Emma Fox
Laura France
Tom Holmes
Chris Kays
Annika Linden
Daniel Miller
Natalie Perkins
Stephen Speirs
Edward Waller

All these British people were murdered in Bali by Islamic terrorists whilst on holiday. Add them to the 67 British reasons from September 11^th as to why this is not just a matter for the United States .. and then please shut the fuck up.

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In the aftermath of what has been bizarrely described as a landmark speech by Prime Minister Tony Blair (or 'The Naive Idiot' as he seems to be known in IRA circles), we are now told in no uncertain terms that the IRA will not disband. Gosh, what a surprise.

As has been the case since British Prime Ministers started making 'landmark speeches' about Northern Ireland from 1968 onwards, and republicans started replying to them, "Sinn Fein's" political spokesmen would have people believe that the Marxist Nationalists of the IRA and the Nationalist Marxists of Sinn Fein are not in fact one and the same thing, regardless of the manifest absurdity of the claim:

Pat Doherty, the Sinn Fein vice-president, said: "The IRA is not Sinn Fein's private army. Sinn Fein is in government because of its electoral mandate and its absolute commitment to the peace process."

And I suppose the SS was not the Nazi Party's private army either. The difference in objectives between the IRA and Sinn Fein are what exactly? Sinn Fein is in government in Ulster in order to induce the IRA to stop setting bombs off. Although it has been manifestly within the capabilities of the British state to achieve a drastic military solution to the main problem of Ulster, the post war British system has ensured that the sort of people who find themselves with their hands on the levers of power in Westminster lack the ruthless Imperial disposition to actually do what would need to be done to put that into effect. Similarly arming the Protestant majority and allowing a bloody 'domestic' demographic solution (i.e. the way it was 'solved' in the former Yugoslavia) is simply far beyond the mindset of modern British polity. None of that is going to change in the foreseeable future of course, as Sinn Fein/IRA are well aware.

So let us not pretend that the persistent terrorist violence of the IRA has not been successful politically and that Sinn Fein is both the beneficiaries and authors of that violence. Accept that and just get on with the process of managing Britain's incremental surrender and withdrawal. Of course if my Green and Orange Northern Irish relatives are anything to go by, what Sinn Fein/IRA will actually get in a post-UK Ulster will be rather different to what they hope for. The Protestants are no more going to disappear under republican pressure than the Nationalists have under British/Loyalist pressure, regardless of what Britain does in the future. The current situation is an Indian Summer, a comfortable delusion that in the long run will be seen to mean a lot less than it currently appears to.

I have always thought it will end extremely badly in Ulster and nothing has changed my mind in the last few years... but to be honest, if I did not know both communities so well I would care a lot more than I actually do.

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A Conservative Government is an organized hypocrisy.
- Benjamin Disraeli

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Paul Marks sees who is really getting shafted by state

It is well known that Sweden has the highest taxes in the Western world (one should always been careful to remember that it is the Western world - the corrupt regimes and plundering rebels in much of the rest of the world make their 'tax as a percentage of G.D.P.' stats quite meaningless).

However, as the Adam Smith Institute has reminded us, it is Britain were taxes have gone up the fastest (in the European Union and, I believe, in the Western world generally world) since 1997.

There is one good thing about this. At least now people will stop talking about there being an economic concept behind 'New' Labour.

There may be many new things about the present government, but its economic policy of tax, spend and regulate is not new.

Paul Marks

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In response to a recent Bruce Bartlett column identifying the top forty "conservative" pop songs of all time, blogger Radley "The Agitator" Balko comes up with his own list in a column for TechCentralStation.

My first reaction to Bartlett's column was: "Ugh! This list reads like Dave Barry's 'Book of Bad Songs'." How can the list be so overwhelmingly dominated by soulless, ham-fisted schlock? Even the handful of great songs seem out of place -- James Brown's "It's a Man's, Man's, Man's World" is an all-time R&B masterpiece, but was the Godfather really proffering a conservative worldview, or is Bartlett reading way too much into it? Could it be that statists are just better rockers than us pro-market types? There have to be more hip tunes that carry a conservative message.

Radley Balko's list is better and fresher, with songs by the Kinks, Vernon Reid and Bob Marley. He also acknowledges the Canadian rock trio Rush, which built an entire concept album around Ayn Rand's "Anthem". Good choices, Radley -- but there are a handful of classics that both Bartlett and Balko have overlooked.

The finest "conservative" rock song of all time is "Trouble Every Day" by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. Now, Zappa wasn't exactly a Goldwater / Reagan conservative, but remember -- pro-democracy, pro-capitalism demonstrators in Czechoslovakia made Zappa's "Plastic People" their anthem.

"Trouble Every Day" originally appeared on the Mothers' double LP "Freak Out!" in 1965. Written in reaction to television coverage of the Watts riots in Los Angeles, this tune manages to savage the news media, ridicule the "root cause" mantra of left-liberals, and even take a timely swipe at LBJ's Great Society. Over a bed of wailing harmonica and Frank's own razor-sharp blues guitar, he ridicules local press coverage of the riot:

You know I watched that rotten box
until my head began to hurt
From checkin' out the way
the newsmen say they get the dirt
Before the guys on channel so-and-so,
and further they are certain
That any show they'll interrupt
to bring ya news if it comes up
If the place blows up,
they'll be the first to tell
Because the boys they got downtown
are workin' hard and doin' swell
And if anybody gets the news
before it hits the street
They say that no one blabs it faster!
Their coverage can't be beat!

Next, he captures the hypocrisy of the rioters (and their apologists) with startling conviction:

Well, I saw the market burning
and the local people turning
On the merchants and the shops
that used to sell their brooms and mops
And every other household item,
watched a mob just turn and bite 'em
And they say it serves 'em right,
because a few of them were white
And it's the same across the nation,
black and white discrimination
Yelling "you can't understand me"
and all that other jive they hand me
On the papers and TV,
and all that mass stupidity
That seems to grow more every day ...

Finally, Zappa has a few choice words for would-be revolutionaries, three years before John Lennon excoriated those "minds that hate":

You know we've got to sit around at home
and watch this thing begin
But I bet there won't be many
who live to see it really end
Because a fire in the street
ain't like a fire in the heart
And in the eyes of all these people,
don't you know that this could start
On any street, in any town,
in any state, if any clown
Decides that now's the time to fight
for some ideal he thinks is right
And if a million more agree,
there ain't no Great Society
As it applies to you and me,
the country isn't free

This is a conservative jam if ever there was one. Do I have more? Of course I do. How about Leonard Cohen's "The Future," a nightmare vision of totalitarianism and the destruction of western culture? How about Ben Harper's "Oppression," a stirring reminder that we all hold the power to overthrow tyranny? How about CCR's "Keep on Chooglin'"? Okay, maybe not that last one.

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What do you say to someone whose 20-something daughter has been transformed into a charcoaled cadaver because she was dancing and drinking cocktails? Personally, I have no idea. I really would not know what to say.

Some, however, seem to possess the requisite linguistic tools. One such is Abu Bakar Bashir a Moslem cleric who offered this advise in an interview with the Australian newspaper The Age:

"Asked if there was anything he wanted to say to families who lost relatives in the bomb blast, he said: "My message to the families is please convert to Islam as soon as possible."

Yes, I have no doubt that they will be falling over themselves in the rush to do just that.

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There can be no liberty unless there is economic liberty.
- Margaret Thatcher

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Dale is right, in their simplistic minds, the news anchors miss the real battle.

Finally, France appears favourably disposed to new U.S. proposals for a draft resolution that now drops any immediate authorisation for a military strike against Iraq unless Baghdad balks at U.N. weapons inspections.

Facing major opposition from everybody, except the trusty Brits who supported all the U.S. drafts, the United States radically changed key parts of its earlier draft resolution which authorised any U.N. member to "use all necessary means" if it decided Iraq violated a whole series of infractions. The new text also deletes earlier proposals explicitly threatening "serious consequences."

It does sound pretty watered down, if you ask me, but after meeting chief U.N. arms inspector Hans Blix, the U.S. Secretary of State, Colin Powell, said that a new resolution would not prevent Washington from undertaking a military strike against Iraq:

"The United States does not need any additional authority even now, if we thought it was necessary to take action to defend ourselves."

The new U.S. compromise has been labelled as a "one-and-a-half step." Instead of two resolutions - one that would give Iraq an opportunity to comply and a second that would authorise force - if the Security council does not do so after reports by Blix of any failure by Iraq to comply with its disarmament obligations, the United States could decide to strike Iraq anyway, and would probably get considerable support to do so.

What seems to be happening is that the French are backtracking whilst trying to preserve some diplomatic dignity. French Ambassador Jean-David Levitte said France insisted on a "two-staged" approach but did not say if this meant a second resolution. Well, given that the U.S. envoys are going around making statements about the U.S. determination to use military force anyway, and in the light of recent terrorist attacks, the opposing Europeans are starting to look like complete twits. The only reason they can get away with it, is that they look quite reasonable next to the rest of the U.N. twits.

The Russian U.N. ambassador, Sergei Lavrov, sharply criticised any unilateral action and warned the United States not to use the Security Council as an excuse for a military strike or one that would lead to a "regime change." I am surprised that the holier-than-thou Russian even understands the meaning of "regime change"!

Bangladesh Ambassador Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury opined:

"Every possible effort should be made to avert war. These views are evidently shared by a preponderant majority of the membership of the United Nations. They must be heard, listened to and heeded."

Yes, and your delusions of relevance must be exposed, dispelled and shown for what they are. An empty rhetoric with potentially dire consequences, endangering lives and safety of millions of innocent citizens whose governments, for once, are trying to have a go at protecting them. It is not often you will hear me support Tony Blair or George Bush as representatives of the state that, in case you missed it, is not your friend...

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It's all been a bit solemn here at Samizdata of late, so here's an extremely silly final titbit from my Slovak holiday.

One of the oddities of Slovakia for the visiting Anglo is their rule of putting "ova" at the end of every non-Slovak female surname. Julia Robertsova. Meg Ryanova. Gwyneth Paltrowova. Odd, but you soon get used to it. One of these ovas did make me smile, however. The Harry Potter books are big in Slovakia, as everywhere, with all the same symptoms being displayed as in Britain. "When's the next one out?" say the kids. "Well at least they're reading something" say the elders. But consider what happens on all the book covers to the name of Harry Potter's creator J. K. Rowling.

Well, I liked it.

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Patrick Crozier is back from his far eastern expedition. His experiences are now showing up on UK Transport - which deals with transport everywhere, and which will one day, I hope, have its name changed to something more everywhere-sounding - and on CrozierVision - which sounds perfect and which now deals with everything else Crozier-related. Apart from UK Transport's title my only other quibble is that most of the photos are displayed too small to appreciate properly. I enlarged one of them by mistake while putting this together, and there's nothing wrong with them that displaying them bigger wouldn't correct at once.

Such trivia aside, it's fascinating stuff. For instance, from the latest CrozierVision piece:

We are told that Japan has been in recession or thereabouts for a decade. So, while I was there I thought I'd try to spot the evidence. It wasn't easy. Cars are new, people are well-dressed, there doesn't seem to be much abandoned property, restaurants seem busy enough, there don't seem to be any sales.

I did however spot a shantytown. This one was in Tokyo and there was a similar if smaller one in Nagoya. Even in destitution the Japanese beat us. Quite simply they have a better class of dosser. Take a careful look at the photos and you will spot that in addition to the regulation cardboard box these people also have blue tarpaulins. Pretty sensible really. I also saw plenty of coat hangers presumably so that could hang out their shirts ready for that all important interview. Japanese cardboard cities also don't smell of stale urine. How they do it I don't know because public toilets in Japan seem pretty thin on the ground.

Patrick will be doing both of the last Friday of the month talks in November, on the 8th at the Evans household in Putney on Congestion Charging (that's road pricing before the spin fraternity got hold of it), and on the 29th at my place on - what else? - Japan.

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Anyone who watched news early this evening could not help but hear the joyful chortling of the anchors about the US losing in the UN and being "put back in a box". Well, as it it turns out it ain't so.

I had a feeling this was the case. The idea the US would sit back and wait for the mushrooms to sprout is just too ludicrous to imagine... unless you are a European news anchor.

But hey, the TV newsies are going after a UK madrassa for child abuse and doing so with both feet and cleats in the air - so they have some redeeming values. They even aired a quote that a child had been told UK law does not apply inside the Mosque!

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The first round of the Mayoral elections are in from Stoke-on-Trent, a provincial town in the British Midlands.

The Labour Party incumbent is running pretty much neck-and-neck with an Independent cadidate but the real news is that the British National Party candidate is only just tucked in behind them and the Conservatives have been pushed into a rather feeble fourth place.

Not time to man the panic stations yet but I suggest that a careful watching brief is maintained.

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Until today, I missed this piece last Friday (Oct 11th) by Tunku Varadarajan for the Wall Street Journal, on the need for a Nobel Non-Science Anti-Prize that could really make sense and do some good. I believe you need to register to make the link work, so here are two of the key paragraphs:

This will not be a joke prize, as the peace prize is; it will be something that Saddam Hussein would get right now, a species of anathema, or international pillory. Apart from being cathartic, a negative award would have a genuine effect on the international order, a real bite in the form of a profound disincentive. Such an award would carry some of the odium of a war-crimes tribunal. No country - or, at least, no civilized country - would allow the winner to visit; and those that do would be tainted. The winner would become a pariah.

Now, that is a deterrent. That kind of award has reason to exist. And it would require some real agonizing over. Imagine the debate: Will it be Robert Mugabe or Kim Jong Il?

Indeed. Several blog-years ago I did a piece on how stupid the Nobel Peace Prize is, on the grounds mostly that peace takes decades to identify, yet they persistently grant it to people who signed alleged peace treaties last Wednesday. Evil, in contrast, can often be identified right now, just as some forms of scientific progress can be. (The cracking of DNA by Watson and Crick springs to mind. As I understand that triumph, they were getting joyously drunk the evening of the day they cracked it.) Likewise, if almost an enitire nation is being systematically starved (as in North Korea right now) you don't need thirty years to realise how evil that was. So yes, I'm for it.

Seriously, if the blogosphere got behind this notion we could really make it happen. Let nominations commence.

Boring I know, and boringly topical, but I think I'd go with whoever is most in charge of North Korea these days. But if you can suggest someone nastier and make your mud stick, go ahead and good luck to you. That's the whole point.

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Glenn Reynolds over on instapundit commented on this article which says pretty much what I've been saying although with quotes from someone more credible than I.

If - as I fear - this is the test run of one of perhaps many attacks of disruption, how do we fight back?

I would posit we will fail utterly if we proceed with the current crime investigation tactics. They are fine for tracking down one serial killer, but are next to useless for dealing with dispersed enemy squadrons.

I suggest anyone living in a "hidden carry" state should buy a handgun with good stopping power; take training in how to use it properly and most importantly in how to make judgements about a situation; and then get your hidden carry approval.

This might not save the targeted victim, but it could make the life expectancy of the sniper after his shot considerably lower. And yes... if we have five or ten million nervous people carrying personal artillery at all times, there will be mistakes and accidents. There always are in warzones in wartime. America has not had to face this on its' own soil since the 1860's.

They have only opened the Maryland front so far. We can pray I am entirely wrong... but I very much fear the war will be coming soon to a community near you.

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If so then people will soon start lying, perjuring and deceiving if they wish to do so in Britain...

Increasingly people may conclude that is the only rational response if they ever find themselves in fear for their life some night in their own home. Barry-Lee Hastings found out what happens if you tell the truth. He killed a burglar in his house using a knife, stabbing him in the back after mistaking a crowbar in the criminal's hands as a machete.

So if you find yourself confronted by an intruder and you live in Britain, generations of cultural logic tell you to not do what the state would have you do: retreat, surrender your property and realise only the state has the right to use force. No, if that person is British then they will understand that the correct thing to do is to fight for what is yours. They will defend themselves as is their inalienable common law right and if need be, kill the person who is threatening them.

...and so some British homeowner find themselves standing over the dead body of a burglar holding a crowbar.

But because they also read the newspapers, watch the television and hopefully read blogs, they will quickly realise that they are still very much in danger. Once they have calmed down, they will start to examine the body of the dead criminal and what they were holding... and they will make sure that the evidence of the intruder's clear and present threat to their life is not just manifest but incontrovertible: if necessary they will cut themselves and arrange things to make the reality of their contention 'hyper-real'. They will conclude there is no shame in defending themselves but they will also realise that it is not just the intruder they must defend themselves against, but also the state which would make them a neutered victim.

If the state wanted to encourage perjury and hostility to the judiciary, it could not have found a better way of going about engendering it. This is Britain's future as the alienation between the commonsensical British expectation of law and the state's law grows.

After presiding over Barry-Lee Hastings' conviction for manslaughter, Judge Barker said:

No one can fail to have sympathy for a householder or visitor who without warning found himself in the position you did when you reached the front door.

Ludicrous dissembling sentiments. I rather doubt Barry-Lee Hastings will give a damn about Judge Barker's worthless 'sympathy' as he rots in jail for the next five years. Well sorry, how is a crowbar in an intruder's hands not a deadly weapon? The next time this happens, as happen it will, I wonder what the next householder with the bloody knife will tell the police? The unvarnished truth? I have my doubts.

The state is not your friend.

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The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less.
- Vaclav Havel

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In the maelstrom of epic and terrible world events, prosaic, but nonetheless, important bits of news have a tendency to slip anonymously beneath the waves of sound and fury. Entirely understandable, I suppose, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't throw out a life-saver every now and then and haul one of the spluttering half-drowned items back in.

The man overboard in this case was an article which appeared in the Telegraph yesterday which covered a speech given by the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Woolf and during which he boldy opined that British Judges are not bound by decisions of the European Court in Strasbourg.

""However, if we are satisfied that the Strasbourg jurisdiction is wrong we should be bold and either not follow or distinguish the Strasbourg decision. If that is what happens, we should take particular care to make clear why we have rejected the authority."

This is significant because I cannot recall having heard any official or serious doubt cast upon universally-accepted position that British Courts are wholly beholden to Strasbourg. It is, if you will, a murmuring of dissent.

Of course, Lord Woolf stresses that conflict would be a rare thing:

"The Lord Chief Justice predicted that occasions when there would be a conflict between the House of Lords and Strasbourg were "likely to be few and far between".

Maybe, maybe not. And, in his position, Lord Woolf could hardly suggest otherwise but the consequences of rejecting a Strasbourg ruling even once means that a precedent is set for further rejections and that kind of thing can so easily snowball to the point where, for all intents and purposes, Britain's judiciary is independent again.

However, the champagne should be kept on ice for now. First of all, Lord Woolf is not a politician and cannot introduce legislation. He is the highest Judge in the land but this is not a ruling, merely an opinion and, as such, has no force of law. His colleagues in the House of Lords are free to reject his invitation but also may take him up on it and proceed accordingly.

Secondly, the entire address was couched in terms of the overriding concern for the rights and welfare of immigrants. This may have been due to the nature of the audience but could equally be the result of the obsession with 'asylum-seekers' that has taken a hold of our entire political and judicial class. Whilst it is not a damnable concern by any means, is it too much to ask that they consider the liberties and rights of the other 60 million people who live here? Still, one step at a time, I suppose.

Overall though, an address in which the country's most senior Judge gives a green light to his fellow Judges to tell Europe to take a hike, must, on balance, be seen as positive.

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Tim Hall says:

Some of the right-wing blogs I've been reading have complained that they'd heard no condemnation of the awful atrocity in Bali from the Islamic community. They should read this.

Yes we should. If we do, we find this:

Whoever has done this has committed a terrible sin and crime. The Quran says "Whoever kills a single human being unjustly is as though he had killed all of humankind" (Surah al-Ma'ida ayah 32). Deliberate murder of another person will put you in Hell forever. Imagine the punishment for those who have killed hundreds or thousands. Whoever has committed this atrocity will have God's wrath upon him.

I fear the hatred and violence that will continue to flow from this. May Allah SWT help us all.

I also followed one of the links in this piece, to "Muslims Condemn Terrorist Attacks", and then the links really start to pile up. I counted no less than 83.

Now I'm no expert on the nuances of Islamic theology, and I cannot possibly tell you how genuine all this condemnation really is. Do they all come from one particular part of the Islamic world, and are we only really looking at old-fashioned intra-Islamic infighting? Search me.

Are they perhaps merely pretending to condemn? Are they merely scared ("I fear the hatred and violence …") that if the West's plan A ("War Against Terrorism") fails, then, united by the failure of plan A to prevent a series of Bali-type horrors around the world, the West might then switch to plan B ("nuke the damn lot of them")?

Well if they are scared, good. They should be scared. If that message is getting through to the Islamic world, perhaps partly via its English-speaking fringes, good good good. There could hardly be better news for humanity than that.

Maybe this vast pile of links has already been Fisked into nothing in some blog now unknown to me and a commentator will supply the link with a sneerful flourish, and that will appear to be that.

But I say that even pretending is good. Someone obviously thought it worth assembling all these alleged condemnations of terrorism, even if they aren't, to make it at least look as if terrorism is being condemned by at least some Muslims. Good. Real changes in thought often begin as a mere pretence that such change has already begun. In politics, again and again, you start by changing the window displays, and then your (at first) mere subterfuge works its way backwards into the shop itself. Such subterfuge does at least mean that some Muslims know that they have a problem.

And maybe it's better than that. Maybe some of this is for real. Maybe those Good Muslims, whom we now curse for their insanely self-destructive silence, really are finding their voices. Maybe they found them months ago, and we've been missing it. True, many of the titles of these links do read more like defences of Islam against the charge of terrorism, rather than actual condemnations of terrorism, but like I say, even that is a step in the right direction, and others among them read like much bigger and more genuine steps in the right direction.

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SCENE: BRUSSELS. OFFICES OF THE EU COMMISSION. THE COMMISSIONERS ARE HUDDLED AROUND A SHEAF OF NEWSPAPER REPORTS FROM THE MIDDLE EAST.

LOUIS: Look at this…..100 per cent!!

HANS: It is truly amazing

DIRK: I wouldn’t believe it if I couldn’t see it with my own eyes

SVEN: Vote after vote, all the same; Saddam, Saddam, Saddam, Saddam, Saddam……

HANS: Yes, and how many did that cowboy Bush get, eh?

LOUIS: Precisely, Hans

DIRK: That lucky, lucky bastard

LOUIS: ‘Luck’ had nothing to do with it, Dirk

SVEN: You’re right, Louis. The Iraqi people obviously adore him

HANS: If only we could get an endorsement like this

DIRK: We, too, have our own loyal supporters

LOUIS: Yes, but they’re both getting old now

SVEN: I don’t understand. What does Hussein have that we don’t?

DIRK: Well, the Americans actually pay attention to him

LOUIS: That’s not the reason, Dirk. No, the man is obviously a campaigning genius

HANS: Clearly

SVEN: 100 per cent. 100 per cent. I just love saying those words…

LOUIS: Sven, get your hands out of your pockets, this instant

SVEN: (Sheepish) Sorry, sorry. I..er…just got a little carried away

DIRK: We must find out Saddam’s secret

HANS: Yes, that must be our top priority

LOUIS bangs his fist down on the table

LOUIS: I know exactly what we must do. We must support the American attack on Iraq!

SVEN: WHAT!!??

DIRK: Louis, are you mad?

HANS: You cannot be serious, Louis

SVEN: What about our principles?

DIRK: What about stability in the region?

HANS: What about my investments in Baghdad?

LOUIS: Listen to me, you fools. We support the American attack, they go in and do all the fighting and depose Saddam….Then we bring him to Brussels and employ him as our Public Relations Consultant.

SVEN: Louis, that’s…that’s brilliant!!

DIRK: Damn, why didn’t I think of that?

HANS: Louis, you are a Born Leader.

LOUIS: I know, Hans, I know. And, one day, all of Europe will agree with you.

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From David Harthill:

I have nothing to add

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The Reuters News Agency is in trouble:

"Shares in Reuters have fallen 23% after the financial information giant reported a drop in sales and warned of continuing problems."

In order to avoid sounding judgmental and offensive, I shall refrain from using the term 'bankruptcy' and instead employ more neutral and appropriate term 'market readjustment'.

[My thanks to The Professor for the link]

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I really like comments, both here and elsewhere. I especially like the comments on Little Missy, because unlike the regular stuff on Little Missy I can actually read them because – and this is very odd - they're in bigger writing. The comments on LM are usually just LM's friends chitchatting amongst themselves, but since I don't know what they chatting about I don't know what they're chatting about, if you get my drift. There's no harm in friendly chitchat of course, but often comments jump out at you as deserving more than just to be forever buried away as number 17 of 24, or whatever. Consider this:

The puzzle of why brilliant people (and I'm talking G. B. Shaw and Sartre here, not Starfish) are often so stupid politically has interested me for a while. My theory is that artistic types have long despised the middle class (despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of them are born into the middle class). This disdain for the boring old sods who become bankers and lawyers and businessmen, along with the tendency to romanticize either the aristocracy or the lower classes predates communism, but with the rise of communism, those old feelings of dislike and contempt became politicized.

I think that's one reason why the left has never come to grips with the horrors of communism or wanted to admit that capitalism, with all its faults, offers more freedom and opportunity to ordinary people than any other system. Admitting that would mean changing one's attitude toward the dull, plodding middle classes and that's too strongly ingrained in Western culture for intellectuals to easily give up.

I think that's good. Also, there is no mention of guns or killing apart from the inevitable reference to communism itself, which for Samizdata just now is a plus, I think. That was comment number 32 (you have to scroll down for it) by "Donna V", concerning comment number 21 by "Mookie Wilson", both apropos of a piece in Little Green Footballs about some arts people who have signed an anti-GW2 internet petition.

Or, for those more bloodthirsty readers who want a more immediate body count in the foreground of the picture, I also think that this comment deserves more attention than maybe it has so far got:

We will know that President Bush and co. are serious about the war against the Islamofascists, not when they bomb cities full of women and children, but rather when we start reading on the back pages of the papers about mysterious deaths (falling in front of street cars, say) happening with suspicious frequency to men rumored to be supporters of radical Islam (including spokesman, apologists and financiers along with the gunmen). We should take a leaf from Mossad - that exploding telephone yesterday was genius (not that the CIA has either the intelligence or ops capacity to pull something like that off). This may not be as immediately gratifying as nuking the SOBs, but the time is not ripe for that. Mr. Islamiya would be a good start.

That comment was posted by Doug Levene on October 15, 2002 03:57 AM, and was one of 28 (so far) on this, here at Samizdata. Do fellow Samizdata writers have other comments to offer? - by other people I mean, which they think deserve to be elevated into actual postings? Has His Holiness Instapundit ever linked to or quoted from a mere comment?

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Thanks to Scrofula we know that the British MP, George Galloway is still out there, way out there.

Galloway spoke last Friday at the American University of Beirut, urging students to take to the streets in massive demonstrations if they wanted to avoid a century in which they will see their resources stolen and continued Israeli domination in the region. He talked about a Western plan aimed at carving the Arab world into smaller and even weaker states.

He claimed that British officials are deciding whether Saudi Arabia will be two or three countries and if Sudan will be two states or not. Their intention, according to Galloway, is to create a holy Saudi Arabia for the Muslims and keep the other Saudi Arabia that has oil fields for themselves.

Nothing's missed, we have it all here - Israel, oil, British imperialism - Brendan O'Neill should leap for joy... I wonder whether Mr Galloway reads Spiked (former Living Marxism).

Galloway told the audience that people in Britain have done their bit by organising protests against a war on Iraq. But he said it is time for Arabs to demonstrate that they can threaten interests of the West in the region.

I led the biggest demonstration in the history of Britain two weeks ago, half a million people marched through the streets of London under the slogan 'Justice for Palestine and no war in Iraq'

Apart from confusing two very different demonstrations and blatantly lying about importance and size of the anti-war one, what the hell is going on here?! How can a representative of the British public, a member of the nation's legislature, incite violence (as in inviting 'demonstration of a threat to insterests of the West in the region') against his own country? This used to be called treason, fair and square, and George Galloway is guilty of it many times over. If democracy has any spine, why is he running around spewing such non-sense as an elected member of the Parliament? Do the people who voted for him agree with his treason?

Treason is "the act of betraying; betrayal of a trust undertaken by or reposed in anyone; a breach of faith, treachery. High Treason or Treason Proper is the violation of a subject of his allegiance to his sovereign or to the state, levying war on the King's dominions, adhering to the King's enemies in his dominions, or aiding them in or out of the realm."

As the power of monarchs declined and the entire population of a country became the sovereign, then betrayal of that entity amounted to treason. So what does treason consist of in the formally democratic nation state? I have found an interesting article dealing with the issue here:

Generally it must be the conscious decision to act in a way which will weaken the integrity of the nation state. Betrayal in the old manner of spying or acting otherwise for an enemy in war is still part of that. The overthrow of a government by undemocratic means might seem to be treasonable by definition, but that begs the question of whether the formally democratic state is operating in a manner to deny meaningful political participation to the masses or whether those in power are behaving in a treasonable manner. If either of the latter conditions apply, the overthrow of a dictatorship in democratic clothing or a treasonable government might well be considered the very reverse of treasonable, provided, of course, that those who enact the overthrow then instigate a political system which does not have those failings nor attempt an overt dictatorship.

The erudite anonymous author1 talks about the EU and politicians treason of the British public:

...the treasonable activity may be misrepresented by the party or politician. A classic example of this is Britain's entry into what is now the European Union (EU). The British electorate were undeniably deliberately misled by the 1970 Tory manifesto into believing that they were merely joining a free trade area. They were deliberately misled again during the 1975 referendum on Britain's continued membership. They have been deliberately misled consistently in the 25 years since the referendum, being told by every government that British sovereignty is not being lost, when massive amounts have been ceded. That is treason by any meaningful definition that has ever been used in the past.

The more I read, the more I agree. Substitute Transnational progressive for the Liberal Internationalist and socialist for liberal and this could have been written for Samizdata:

The Liberal Internationalist propaganda has been so successful that treason has an old fashioned ring to the modern Briton. It seems to be something to mock along with the very idea of patriotism. So long have the British been at peace, so safe does everyday life seem, so ruthlessly have the liberal elite and their educational and media nomenclatura promoted the idea that the time of the nation state is passed, that even naturally patriotic Britons find the idea of treason an uncomfortable one.

Why am I, an anti-statist libertarian, bothered about treason against the very institution I abhore? Because there is a difference, as argued by Perry de Havilland and others ad infinitum, between the belief that state has no role in a society (anarchism) and the belief that limited state has an essential and useful role in protection, defence and law enforcement (minarchism). And so we judge George Galloway's behaviour to be an act of treason undermining the security of the country as well as condemn all those who do the same by imposing the EU Tranzi agenda on the British sovereign.

1 = Who goes under the name Phillip in the email me section...

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The media and bureaucrats are at least beginning to discuss the possibility of al Q'aeda involvement. After you've read the article come back and I'll finish....

Okay. What is blatantly obvious in the comments? Do you see the same pre-September 11th thought patterns I see?

We are no longer dealing with terrorism that fits into the familiar tick box on government forms. We are not looking at terrorism intended to make a statement or to get prisoners released. We are not looking at terrorism as an isolated event with an isolated purpose.

We are looking at the face of 21st Century warfare.

The enemy is out to destroy our society by any means possible. They don't need to give manifestos to the media about their purpose because the attacks are a warfighting tactic, not a statement.

If any of our readers happen to be in the right circles, please tell these officials to get their heads out of the box and start thinking WAR, not comfortable 1980's statement oriented violence happenings.

Let's stop talking about Motive. That's police work. Start talking Strategy, Tactics and Objectives and how the Beltway events fit into the big picture of this World War.

I might be entirely wrong about the unfolding of this event.... but even if it is homegrown psychos this time... it won't be the next.

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Iain Murray has scared the **** out of me.

If the Blogger bug strikes, as it might well (some bug has certainly prevented me from posting at all on my own blog today), go to The Edge of England's Sword and scroll down until you reach the words "The end of Habeus Corpus in Britain." The thing I'm talking about was posted on Tuesday October 15th at 9.19 am.

Don't give me any of your excuses, either. Whatever the difficulty, go there.

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I found a link to this story on Glenn Reynolds Instapundit.

I'm not the only one looking at the al Q'aeda angle.

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I'm back from Slovakia now, and had a lovely time thanks. On my final weekend, while football related mayhem reigned in Bratislava, I took a trip northwards to the Czech countryside. I was shown several fine churches, but the most intriguing item of my stay did not involve any sightseeing trips, at any rate not by me. It concerned, rather, one of my host's first cousins, a man called Karel Krautgartner.

Krautgartner was Czecho-Slovakia's answer to Benny Goodman, that is to say a hugely accomplished jazzman who could also more than hold his own in the classical repertoire, on clarinet, saxophone and all related instruments. My host played me a videotape of a Czech TV documentary recently shown to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of Krautgartner's death. He looked like a James Bond villain, and played sublimely. He didn't seem to have been a huge creative musical force. But he was a great band leader and organiser, who inserted successive jazz innovations from America into Czech musical life, and who added middle-European technical polish and discipline to everything he touched.

Krautgartner was only about sixty when he died, of cancer of the colon, in West Germany. He had emigrated there on account of his unwillingness, following the suppression of the Prague Spring of the late nineteen sixties in which he had played a prominent part, to become a Soviet stooge. Concerning Krautgartner's death my host told me a fascinating and terrible story, which was not mentioned in the documentary, but which my host had learned through being personally acquainted with many of the personalities involved.

Somewhere in the Urals, during the nineteen fifties, a nuclear bomb went off by mistake in a research laboratory, devastating the entire surrounding region, with, as you can imagine, appalling loss of life.

The USSR, being the USSR, decided a few years later, in the early sixties, to start repopulating the area, and damn the consequences in terms of human disease, which were appalling too. The USSR was no lover of jazz, but it was willing to use jazz for its own higher purposes, such as to add a dash of glamour to an otherwise wholly dreadful human environment where it nevertheless wanted people to live, and so various showbiz acts were despatched to the area, including a jazz band lead by Karel Krautgartner. And, according to my host, Krautgartner wasn't the only one to die at about the age of sixty, of cancer. They all did. That's right. The entire band later died prematurely of cancer. And this after a visit lasting hardly more than a few days.

Now I don't understand the technicalities of thermo-nuclear pollution, but it seems that it is not something that is evenly spread. It concentrates itself in particular places where it finds it particularly easy to hang around, and as a result there was one happy exception to the collective, delayed death sentence that the band later found itself condemned to.

One of the band members took a more, let us say, American jazzman's view of his responsibilities, and passed on the sight-seeing aspect of the trip, choosing instead to stay stuck in his hotel room consuming a continuous supply of cigarettes and alcohol. As a result he lived about a decade longer than the others.

I love that. A man's life is prolonged by his addiction to alcohol and nicotine. True, he eventually died of throat cancer brought on by smoking too much, but even so: hurrah!! Smoking And Drinking Can Sometimes Seriously Protect Your Health.

I treasure this story, because it seems to me to sum up, in a way that is downright artistic, the whole multi-faceted achievement that was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics – its obsession with punching militarily above its weight, its proneness to huge accidents; its indifference to human life, including human lives appropriated from far away countries; its hatred of everything popular and western but its willingness to succumb to such things for its own over-ridingly vile purposes; the spectacular poisoning of the environment, far, far beyond the worst of the petty pollutions committed by Western corporate capitalism; the way that the most intelligent thing to do if you got swallowed up in it was to get blind drunk; and the way that it all eventually collapsed amidst a hurricane of plummeting life-expectancy statistics. It's all there. (Only the arctic death camps are missing, but they've been well covered by others.) And I treasure being a Samizdatan and having somewhere to put the story.

What I don't know is how well known it already is. My host reckoned this hadn't been written about before, not with regard to these particular musicians anyway. But there must be a mass of reportage of the explosion itself and general surrounding miseries, especially now that the USSR's successor government has finally admitted that the thing did happen. Samizdata readers are pretty hot on the technicalities of weaponry, so maybe there'll be some good comments and the story will grow somewhat. I hope so. It's important to keep reminding ourselves what a good thing it was that the Cold War was won, mostly without severe explosions, by Civilisation rather than by its opponents.

(Come to think of it, fellow Samizdatan Dale Amon knows about weapons and about this kind of music, the way I know about neither. I wonder what he may have to tell us.)

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Watching Britain's Channel 4 news channel last night, I was treated to the amazing scene when its main newscaster, Jon Snow, announced that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had been reelected by more than 99 percent of the vote. No mention was made of the fact that the elections did not permit anyone else but Hussein to stand, thereby rendering the vote's outcome a total farce. What was even more bizarre was how Snow - a man of the Left - announced the result with a totally straight face.

To be fair, the programme's subsequent coverage of the poll highlighted its essentially coercive nature. Even so, Snow's performance was telling.

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Invincibility lies in the defense; the possibility of victory in the attack. One defends when his strength is inadequate; he attacks when it is abundant.
- Sun Tzu

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Russell Whitaker sees sections of the medical profession's distaste for accessable services for what it really is

From the "I saw this on Fox News several weeks ago but just got around blogging about it now" department, comes another tale of indignation, this time from the medical guild.

In an article transcription of a TV news feature featuring an adversarial interview of obstetrician Dr. Leon Hansen, founder of Fetal Foto versus Dr. John Hobbins, one of a stable of media medical expert witnesses who hew to the usual AMA trade unionist line.

Fetal Foto is a shopping mall medical imaging service. It's apparently harmless, and lets prospective parents get a real head start on boring their friends with their family photo albums. Dr. Hobbins is incensed that Dr. Hansen is providing it on the cheap:

The high-tech scan, which isn't covered by insurance, costs $60 at a Fetal Fotos facility and $280 at his doctor's office, according to Hansen.

But the trend has angered the FDA and other critics, who argue it's exploitative and dangerous and is commercializing a sensitive medical procedure.

"Here's a group that's using this wonderful technology to put bucks in their pockets," said Dr. John Hobbins, head of obstetrics at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center.

What really angers Dr. Hobbins and his cronies is that the bucks are lining someone else's pockets, and in a shopping mall of all places. As Fetal Foto's Dr. Hansen notes:

"Twenty years ago, they felt it was inappropriate to have a pregnancy test available to the general public," he said.

Other shopping mall boutique medical success stories include adult whole-body imaging service AmeriScan, which rightfully claims to have contributed to the saving of a number of lives through early diagnosis of various ailments, e.g. male colon cancer.

The Fetal Foto business model explicitly excludes medical diagnosis - it most vehemently is not in the diagnosis or treatment businesses, by charter - but this is not what bothers the boys in the AMA.

No, what riles the unionists is that they have no control over the use of an interesting medical procedure used for non-medical purposes. They're embittered by the fact that, after all, medical people provide services that people want, and some people are willing to take those services to what they and other "public health" gatekeepers revile as among the worst venues in the capitalist world, the modern bazaar of the American shopping mall.

After all, it boils down to tired arguments of guild protectionism and class warfare with these people. Long live the crass temples of capitalism!

Russell Whitaker

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Last Tuesday (Oct 11th) some of the world's most influential free-market think-tanks met over dinner at Shepherd's restaurant in Westminster, London. The occasion was the launch of a new French language libertarian think-tank called the Turgot Institute which will be based in Brussels, but aiming at the Francophone world.

Turgot, an 18th century economist and statesman, is generally credited with coining the expression "laissez-faire, laissez-passer" (there is an alternative claim). His economic reforms, blocked by established interests, were probably the last hope for France of avoiding the carnage of the French Revolution.

The think-tanks represented included: Centre for New Europe (Brussels), Institute for Economic Affairs (UK), Independent Institute, Cato Institute, Foundation for Economic Freedom, and Ludwig von Mises Institute (all US), also one Candian and one Flemish whose names I didn't catch.

150 years ago this is the sort of gathering that would have launched a Communist group in a European country. More news on this development as it breaks.

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I remember seeing an American-made TV movie thriller a few years ago where a young female babysitter, alone in a big house, receives threatening phonecalls from a psychotic killer. She calls the police who advise here to stay calm while they trace the origin of the calls. Meanwhile the abusive phonecalls from the killer grow more deranged and fenzied. Terrified out of her wits, she then receives a call back from the police telling her to get out of the house: they've traced the call and it's coming from an upstairs bedroom!

Well, we're all young female babysitters now; a transformation formally recognised by the Telegraph:

"Terrotist recruitment and fundraising by Islamic militants centred on a London mosque were ignored for years by the British security services, a former Special Branch informant claimed yesterday."

Perhaps the spooks were on leave or something.

"While his British handlers preferred to keep a watching brief on the mosque, where the imam is the radical cleric Sheikh Abu Hamza al-Masri, the French became increasingly infuriated.

French counter-terrorism experts refer to the capital as "Londonistan" because of the number of wanted extremists who have sought and found safe haven there."

We actually managed to infuriate the French through lack of action. Surely a world first?

""The French felt British law was very, very soft on these people. Britain was looking at Irish terrorists; it couldn't see the threat. It gave these people flats, benefits, passports, citizenship."

That's a relief. For a minute I was worried that some of their needs were not being fully catered for. Anything else required? Satellite TV? Chauffeur-driven limousine? Jacuzzi? Comfort girls?

As I type, Detectives from Scotland Yard are jetting off to Bali to look for terrorists. One wonders what, precisely, has been stopping them from taking a bus to Finsbury Park? And if any non-Britons are mystified as to how this bureacratic indifference on the home front squares with Tony Blair's (quite genuine, I believe) hawkishness in the War on Terror, all I can say is, join the club.

Whatever the explanation (assuming there is one at all), we find ourselves in the tangled undergrowth of the most dangerous possible combination of tactics in response to Islamic terrorism: aggressive foreign policy and an inept domestic policy.

Those phonecalls are getting increasingly threatening. I sincerely hope we don't all end up running from the house screaming.

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Whilst surfing the Internet I came upon a site purporting to show
What's wrong with libertarianism. As I like to think I am always looking for a challenge, I though a little bit of fisking was in order given that most of what the site is critiquing is in fact libertarian influenced neo-conservatism, not actually 'libertarianism' at all. Also Zompist claims to argue on the basis of morality but in fact goes on to make an entirely utilitarian series of propositions.

When asked why not deregulate the economy, Zompist replied 'We tried that and failed'... He then proceeds to actually make the libertarian case for us by arguing that in the supposedly unregulated past, the state would carry out 'gunboat diplomacy in support of business interests'.

Of course one must have a significant interventionist state that owns gunboats and is structured in such a way to allow it to be manipulated by business in the first place... hardly an example of a 'minimal state' or perhaps Zompist thinks the Rockefeller family actually owned its own corporate logo'ed gunboats rather than the United States Navy.

Even more bizarrely Augusto Pinochet is held up as an example of an advocate of a minimal state! How does increasing the size of the security apparatus to impose the power of the state make a person an advocate of a minimal state? Duh.

Zompist then goes on to 'explain' why unregulated capitalism does not work.

• Poor people are generally ill-served by even basic-level businesses.
  • That is because they are poor and can support less businesses. Even if the state paid for the construction of a mall in every poor area, how would the shops there survive in any economic system? This is pre-economics 101 stuff.

• People in the inner city pay more for food and pay surprisingly high rent.
  • The reduce the absurd amount of red tape to set up a business and allow competition for the money of poor people. I wonder if Zompist, who has probably never actually tried to run a business, has any idea how hard it is to get the myriad of planning permissions to set up new enterprises.

  • Also rents are pushed up by reducing the supply of rental properties and the best way to do that is to impose rent controls (which is tantamount to property rationing) and/or impose onerous super-contractual obligations on landlords to the point they simply take their properties off the market. This has been observed again and again around the world.

• Banks happily take their money but won't loan to them.
  • If the bank is not providing anything to a low income depositor (who costs the bank nearly as much as a high value depositor to administer), then why do low income depositors not just keep their money under a mattress? Obviously the 'evil bank' actually is providing some value to poor old Joe Ghetto after all.

  • Also no doubt if the banks would in fact lend to anyone, Zompist would be pointing at banks which had collapsed due to profligate lending to poor low income risks and saying "See? They need more regulation!" Loans are made upon the basis they are repaid... if you have a small income and few or no collateralizable assets, it would be absurd to expect people to lend you money. That Zompist cannot understand suggests a complete lack of understanding real economics.

• The minimum wage isn't enough to live on.
  • Then why have a minimum wage at all? Low wages are a symptom of a much wider malaise but in the simplistic world view of the left, there is never more than a single causal step.

• Their employers don't pay health benefits; and private health insurance is too expensive.
  • If charities had not been effectively 'crowded out of the market' by the state, this would not be such a big deal.

• Highly polluted areas, the sort that cause nasty diseases, are concentrated in the poor parts of the city.
  • In the Soviet bloc, high levels of pollution were endemic. Perhaps Zompist thinks communist regime are insufficiently regulated too?

• The entire near west side of Chicago, just east of where I live, doesn't have a single movie theater.
  • So what? What gives people an inalienable right to a subsidied cinema at someone elses expense for God's sake?! "Give us cinemas or give us death"?

• Services the middle class takes for granted, like cashing their paychecks for free, are expensive for the poor.
  • But then banks actually make money on the accounts of middle class account holders. Why should some people expect to use a banks services when they provide little or negative return otherwise?

• Since things like pollution and racial discrimination and food poisoning don't affect direct costs, the market (efficient as it is in other ways) doesn't address them.
  • Huh? If someone poisons you, then sue them for a few million. That sure as hell affects direct costs. Any libertarian who has a problem with that concept is as incoherent as Zompist.
  
   
  
• Businesses will poison the environment, lie to consumers, sell unsafe goods, abuse workers, play games with financial statements, insider-trade, discriminate, form monopolies and cartels, profiteer, buy off politicians, and much more.
  • Ah, and government will not do all of these things? At least you can sue a company... try doing that to the state and then tell me which is harder. As for the fact it is possible to 'buy off politicians', I suppose union bosses would never do that sort of thing. Also, that is yet another splendidly libertarian point Zompist is making: the only way to prevent political corruption is to keep the level of power the political system has at its disposal to a minimum.

Later on Zompist claims the solutions are:

• The rule of law. That means regulations, effective police, and fair courts. As Stephen Holmes said, "There is no rule of law until the Mafia needs lawyers." Neal Stephenson makes the same point in Zodiac: in a liberal society, you can shame companies into obeying the law, because companies don't like bad P.R. You don't have that leverage with mafias.
  • Rule of law, sure, but that does not mean regulation. The rational libertarian position is in full agreement with the need for the rule of law but the trick it to prevent that turning into the rule of politics. The inability to see the difference is where the left come consistently unstuck.
  
   
  
• Consumer trust. That means that abuse and fraud are persecuted, and you don't have to get things done by paying bribes (a big reason most poor countries stay poor).
  • Zompist makes another splendidly libertarian position: paying bribes only makes sense if the people to whom the bribe is paid have enough power to make things to your liking. Zompist talks about 'facts' as if they are on his side and yet the notion that it is anything less than absurd utopianism to suggest politics can ever be free of corruption flies in the face of experience the world over. Only by sawing off the very levers of political power themselves, i.e. by reducing the size of the state, can the inevitable corruption that comes with political power be mitigated.
  
   
  
• Responsive government and business. That means democracy, stockholder and union rights, and a free press. Personally, I think someday we're going to discover that monarchy doesn't work for business, either.
  • Government responsive to whom? Alas the reality is ALWAYS that it is responsive to whoever is best at manipulating the political system and can anyone but the most purblind communist really think that is really going to be 'the common people' (whatever that means)?

  • Business, however, is spectacularly more 'responsive' to the stimuli of the market. To be otherwise is to go bust if new entrants to the market are not prevented from competing for effectively for business.
  
   
  
• Competition. Monopolies charge higher rates, stifle innovation, abuse dependent companies, and provide lousy service. (The robber barons of the 1800s were explicitly after monopolies, and they wanted them in order to raise profits.)
  • Yet again, thanks to Zompist for making our point for us. Harmful monopoly can only occur if the state can be used to lock in existing market players and exclude new entrants. Regulation designed to prevent monopolies actually do exactly the opposite!
  
   
  
• A wide-based business pyramid-- not just a few multinationals on top. Smaller companies are usually the engine of innovation and the biggest producers of new jobs.
  • All this is absolutely true! Vast bloated businesses occur when the regulations and of the state conspire to make establishment of local smaller businesses more expensive by imposing regulations and costs that are insignificant to big players but are business killers to poorly capitalised start-ups.

• No barriers to social rising or business innovation (e.g. racism, monopolies, "licensing" whose only purpose is to protect existing business, unavailable loans or courts, bribes, mafias).
  • Correct... and that name of those 'barriers to social rising or business innovation' is REGULATION.

Oh, and in making his points, Zompist falls at the very first fence: Ayn Rand did NOT regard herself as a libertarian.

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To add to the recent outburst of gun-related posting I think this will work a treat!

Unfortunately, it appears to be only an urban legend. But even the fact that such story has been coined is a good sign. We need more of those! Both, grannies and stories...

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So says Neil Morris, a Marine sniper with two decades experience in an interview done by Fox News. Neil adds:

"Anything the sniper does or fails to do that give his position away to the threat, snipers don't do that, They don't leave brass laying around, and they damn sure don't leave tarot cards."

Chuck Mawhinney, another professional with up to 300 battlefield kills to his credit told the interviewer the calibre is wrong:

The Washington killer has been using a .223 caliber projectile, which some have called a standard sniper bullet. But Mawhinney, who lives in Baker City, Ore., said a professional sniper would use a heavier load, at least a .30 caliber.

The one statement I have my doubts about comes from someone who should certainly know better than I. Eric Haney, one of the Delta Force founders, says 100 yard kills are no big deal:

"It's the kind of thing that if you've never shot a rifle before in your life, you and I could spend 90 minutes together and you can do this,"

I think he's exaggerating a little here. I'm only a casual shooter with no training beyond a basic Army Rifle Qual 30 years ago, but I've done a fair amount of "plinking" over the years prior to moving to GunFree Northern Ireland. I seriously doubt I could rack up 11 of 12 hits and 9 of 11 kills at 100 yards under stressful conditions... even with 90 minutes of Delta Force training.

The pros think it is two young men working together. One is a driver/spotter who stays calm; the other makes the kill. They might swap places.

A terrorist motivation still makes more sense to me than anything else. These "two" are equal opportunity killers. That scratches the homegrown Neo-Nutsies from the list - unless they are working for someone else. If not military professionals, the shooters are at least calm planners of reasonable markmanship. If they are both truly crazy, they are crazy in a calm and emotionless way.

One has to ask, "what is the point?" If they are psychotics it could be just racking up the score. Perhaps they are environuts out to cull the herd; or losers out for excitement and To Go Down in a final Bon Jovi Blaze of Glory.

My personal thoughts? Pro shooters or not, I think it is an al Qaeda attack. The tactical goal is to spread fear and create chaos in their enemy's capitol. The logic of a low-investment high-return attack for al Qaeda is so strong that even if they had not considered it before, they must certainly see the possibilities now.

I said it over a year ago: we're all soldiers now. If this is an attack, and if - at low cost - it is followed up by more such, there will be little choice for Americans but to go about daily business with a gun close to hand.

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Russell Whitaker sorts the sad facts from the ideological drivel regarding the much deprecated SA80 rifle

In an article typical of London's The Guardian newspaper - noxiously socialist but sometimes well-researched - I read a sad account of the SA80 British infantry carbine.

In typical socialist fashion, James Meek takes potshots at privatization, in the context of its involvement in the debacle, speaking to the sorry state of the government-owned Royal Ordnance facility of the once-venerable Enfield:

Thanks to privatisation, the atmosphere in the factory was a poisonous mix of bitterness, anger and apathy. Workers who thought that they had a job for life felt betrayed by a government which, many had believed, was both patriotic and pro-military.

I'd argue that the expectation of a "job for life" was part of the cause of quality problems with the weapon, but that point has been set to rest by its evident failures in societies ranging from communist Russia to corporatist Japan.

What's especially interesting is the passing mention of the involvement of Germany's Heckler & Koch (H&K to us gunnies) in helping to fix the bloody mess:

In 1985, the German gunmakers Heckler & Koch, who had been asked to do some sub-contracting work on training ammunition, were sent two of the new rifles. Shortly after the consignment arrived, the officer who had sent them got a phone call. The voice at the other end said he was calling about the British rifle. He said: "You know it goes off when you drop it?" The officer admitted that he didn't. He fetched a gun from the armoury and dropped it. It went off. German experts had discovered a dangerous safety flaw in a British rifle which, after supposedly exhaustive testing and acceptance into service, the Brits themselves had failed to find.

and:

Those who have used it say the new version of the gun, redesigned by Heckler & Koch, is better, but complaints still came in when it was used in Afghanistan. Confidence, rather than reliability, may now be the real problem.

I've spoken to acquaintances who've had to carry the SA80, and a very close friend formerly of the U.S. Army Special Forces, who confirm that in very recent times, the SA80, in its A2 incarnation, has evolved into an adequate infantry carbine. It's worth noting in some of Parliament's own notes of 2000, H&K UK Ltd (also mentioned in MoD/DLO SA80 Individual Weapon (IW) & Light Support Weapon (LSW) Modification Programme notes) has taken over from Royal Ordnance as the Design Authority for the weapon.

Mr. Meeks should admit that the only way to salvage the soiled reputation of the SA80 is complete privatization, ruthless outside testing combined with an intense feedback loop involving design & manufacturing... and years of unavoidable wait & see, with British squaddies acting as hapless test dummies.

In the meantime, variants of the privately-produced (usually by Colt and Bushmaster) U.S. M-16 (e.g. the M4A1) will continue as the choice of the SAS, not surprising given the "2nd culture" nature of most special forces units worldwide: spec ops guys, within limits, generally get their choice of personal weapons.

Russell Whitaker

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The main thing that endears the United Nations to member governments, and so enables it to survive, is its proven capacity to fail, and to be seen to fail.
- Conor Cruise O'Brien

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The curious thing about idiots is that they never allow their intellectual disabilities to slow them down; always frightfully quick off the mark, they are. Mind you, it does help if you have the script already written beforehand.

As per usual the Guardian is the frontrunner (and I promise that I am not making it up this time):

"Short-sighted politicians in Washington, notably Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, are putting it about that there are links between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein. They have been trying desperately to come up with evidence to prove it, a task which they have singularly failed to achieve. But in trying they have diverted the resources of their intelligence agencies, including the CIA, and worse, they are trying to manipulate intelligence-gathering for political ends."

So now the Australians know who to blame; it was Rumsfeld all along! And he would've gotten away with it too if hadn't been for those pesky Guardianistas!

Hot on the heels of the frontrunner, comes the The Subservient:

"But some of the pool of grievances on which al-Qa'ida draws are real injustices – in particular the failure of the US to use its influence to secure a fair settlement between Israelis and Palestinians. These injustices ought to be resolved anyway, but resolving them may well reduce the supply of potential martyrs to murderous causes."

Freedom for Zionist-occupied..er..Bali.

"The response of world leaders to this weekend's attack should be to act to ensure that there is more justice in the world, rather than to deepen the sense of injustice that is the breeding ground of terrorists."

Oh I'd wager that there are quite a lot of people just aching for a bit of justice, my old chum.

You know, in a world of rapidly spiralling uncertainties, there is a perverse comfort in knowing that some things never change.

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183 people at least are dead, probably more as 220 Australians and 20 or so British remain unaccounted for. All the victims were civilians, mostly young backpackers on holiday or the Indonesian staff serving them. Yet judging by what I seen written by John Pilger or Robert Fisk or Noam Chomsky since September 11th of last year, I thought the reason terrorists are attacking 'us' was something to do with injustice in Palestine? Is Bali part of Palestine? How many Palestinians have the Australian Army killed?

I recall hearing that the WTC was attacked because it was a symbol and centre of exploitive capitalism and the US military industrial complex. And what exactly was the Sari Club in Bali a symbol of? Will the people on WarbloggerWatch or at New Stateman tell us how the forces of US imperialism have been thwarted by the death of so many young Aussies and others in a holiday resort?

What was that you said? It is all about oil? Ah, silly me.

Evil-white-male and immodest un-Islamic
Australian woman flee Bali attack last night

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What with the England - Slovakia football match last Saturday and Brian Micklethwait's visit to Bratislava, it has been an unusual period of publicity for the small country wedged between its better known Central European neighbours - the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary.

In his post What EU means to Slovakia Brian waxed lyrical about the sophistication of the Slovak high-school students and their ability to transcend the limitations of their environment. They managed to turn Brian's perception of himself up-side down:

For the Slovaks, the Internet is the world. Suddenly I felt like a provincial oik, from a huge but basically non-central kind of place like Yorkshire or Texas, in the presence of the world's true sophisticates.

Then we get the news of racist abuse aimed at two black players in the England team during the European Championship in Slovakia last Saturday¹. Emile Heskey, along with Ashley Cole, says he was subjected to the worst racist abuse he has experienced in his career.

"We heard the racist stuff because it just wasn't in one section of the stadium, it was virtually the whole ground... To hear it in this day and age is shocking and you would have thought that people might have moved on from that sort of thing by now."

Quite. So what is Slovakia really like? A country of which we know little and care even less, it hasn't yet found any symbolic associations that gets small, and big, nations through the day - Switzerland has cheese and cuckoo clocks, Scotland has whisky and tartan, Czech Republic has beer and Prague, Russia has vodka and chaos etc.

The truth is that Slovakia is neither a hidden gem of sophistication a là Brian's post nor a den of primitive and dangerous louts. It is a country suffering from the effects of long-term isolation under communism and a history of neglect and bashing by its bigger and 'superior' neighbours. The symptoms are standard and predictable - a severe inferiority complex coupled with an outrageously inflated sense of importance. So, a single conversation can contain scathing criticism of all things Slovak, from politics to your next door neighbours, as well as a vociferous defence of the Slovak ways as the best, never admitting that there may be something better outside your immediate world and interpreting behaviour of the outside world as if Slovakia was its focal concern. The result of such an autistic worldview is usually a breeding ground