Every dollar spent in a libertarian society on public goods will accomplish far more than a dollar spent by the welfare state. So even if a free society spends less money, it is far from clear that it will perform less charity.

- Patri Friedman, Catallarchy

Advice Goddess Amy Alkon, whose writing is always good for a laugh, has a disturbing piece on her site about how useless the police were when her car was stolen. On one occasion, a friend spotted her car and, when she rang the police to tell them exactly where they could find it, she was fobbed off by a disinterested operator who read from a script and did not send officers to retrieve it. Later, when the man she knew (and the cops strongly suspected) had stolen her car was known to be at home, Alkon called the LAPD and told them exactly where they could pick him up. The police receptionist told her that no detectives were around, and that she'd have to call back the next day to speak to anyone who could help her.

In the end, Alkon had to get her car back from the thief herself, using good old fashioned shame and hostility. She even enlisted her mother in trying to guilt him into returning items that were in the car when he stole it. But few will be surprised at what the real consequences were for the thief.

Fred still hasn't been arrested. The case was knocked down to a misdemeanor and so the police can't go into his house to pick him up...So far his punishment has amounted to being forced to disconnect his phone, probably because he couldn't take the telephone harassment from me and, especially, my mother. Still, I don't regret the experience. I had great fun moonlighting as a private detective, I gained newfound faith in humanity, thanks to the Rambler nuts and the other near-strangers who went out of their way to help me, and I'd learned a surprising little lesson: In Los Angeles, crime pays.

Of course this state of affairs is not confined to Los Angeles. Everyone seems to know someone who has been similarly screwed over by police bureaucracy and incompetence. I know some good cops. But pieces like these make it all the more puzzling to me that so many people trust the police so unquestioningly, both to serve and to protect. Do they genuinely believe that the system is stacked in their favour, or is it something people tell themselves in order to feel secure?

Yes, Fahrenhiet 9/11 is 'patriotic art' in the same way Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will" was patriotic art... and both take a similar relativist view regarding the role of reality in film making

We have endless claims that global warming caused the Boscastle floods in Cornwall.

Now global warming may be a real problem, and it may be caused (at least in part) by human action (rather than sunspot activity and/or other natural factors). But I do not hear many people (although there are a few) saying "oh we must have more nuclear power stations to replace C02 generating power sources" - instead it is just the normal capitalism is evil stuff and demans for more wind turbines and other such (whose contribution to power generation can, at best, only be minor).

There is also something else to be thought about. The endless talk about global warming distracts attention from other factors that might be involved in the flooding.

Cornwall has had very heavy rain before in the past - and the buildings than have been flooded were centuries old. Could the flooding have anything to do with the narrowing of the river (in a government 'reclaim land' scheme) and the building of a new road bridge?

A letter in the Daily Telegraph yesterday claimed exactly this - and was ignored by the broadcast media.

It reminds me of the flooding in the South East of England some time ago. There were endless claims that it was due to global warming - and much later (and without much publicity) it slipped out that there had been various government building schemes that had undermined the drainage system of the area concerned.

Not all government 'investment' is just a waste of money (and therefore a denial of what people could have done with the money, had it not been taken from them), some of it causes direct harm as well.

Only if you say things that are favoured in Islington, it would seem.

Some odious Jamaican singer rejoicing in the name of Beenie Man could be charged under British law with incitement to violence because of the anti-homosexual lyrics of his songs.

I am all for the annoying Peter Tatchell trying (with some success) to cause 'Beenie Man' and his ilk financial difficulties by getting sponsorship deals cancelled as a result of their hate-mongering: that is civil society in action and an altogether good thing... but unless 'Bennie Man' actually starts taking up his bazooka for real, the state has no business suppressing free speech by force.

The essential civil liberties called 'freedom of expression' are rather more important that the actual substance of some idiotic reggae song. Has the culture of liberty really decayed so far that this sort of overarching state control can be tolerated? Freedom of expression for the politically favoured or the mainstream are the easy bits... it is when some detestable half-wit homophobic prat like 'Beenie Man' opens his noisome trap that you discover what the real state of civil liberties in a country is.

Pathetic. It is just a song and the state has no business banning songs.

The trouble with all this free-market capitalism (according to every reliable and sound authority on the subject) is that it results in a cruel, dog-eat-dog society where the strong and the rich grow stronger and richer while the poor and weak get trampled underfoot in the headlong stampede for endless profits.

This is why markets must be subject to the moderating influence of a compassionate government which must deploy a range of taxes, regulations and laws to stave off the worst predations of naked greed and help create a level-playing field and decent living conditions for all those poor and feeble people.

Here endeth the first lesson in received wisdom: [Note: link to article in UK Times may not work for readers outside of the UK]

THE black economy does Britain good because it helps to keep poor people off the breadline and develop their "entrepreneurial skills", a report commissioned by the Government has found.

Efforts to stamp out moonlighting — including a year-long £5 million advertising campaign — were misguided because tax dodges were a way of providing the needy with a financial safety net, the study commissioned by John Prescott’s office found.

It may cause some cognitive disonance to reverberate around the corridors of power to be told that the best way to help the poor is to let them out of the prison that has purportedly been built for their benefit.

Clearly not satisfied with mere temporal power, some of Europe's ruling elite are now seeking divinity:

A campaign to sanctify the European Union through the beatification of its founding father, Robert Schuman, has run into stiff resistance from the Vatican and now appears likely to fail.

For 14 years investigators under the diocese of Metz have combed through the life of the French statesman to determine whether he merits the title "Blessed Robert", the first step to sainthood.

The drive for his beatification and eventual canonisation was launched by a private group in Metz, the St Benoit Institute, but has acquired powerful backers, including President Jacques Chirac.

I can find no information about the St Benoit Institute but the reference to 'powerful backers' leads me to suspect that they are merely the low-profile conduits for a project which has been germinated at a far higher and more official level.

I seldom comment of matters of religious doctrine or practice because, as someone without any faith to speak of, I do not consider them to be any of my business. However, this is not really about the practices of the Roman Catholic Church or even about the status of the late Mr. Schuman but more about Europe's elite seeking divine provenance for their transnational machine.

Is this how they now see themselves? As apostles of a blessed prophet working to establish a Church of Brussels? Would they prefer to be seen as the 'Annointed' rather than merely a political nomenklatura?

The presses of the European Fourth Estate may ring out furious daily denunciations of 'American arrogance' but I submit that it is next to impossible to find anything more wildly hubristic than a post hoc claim to the benediction of Holy Writ. Close your eyes for a moment and try to imagine the chorus of snorting, braying contempt that would be served up in response to George Bush seeking canonisation of, say, Thomas Jefferson.

I believe it was our friend David Farrer who first coined the term 'Holy Belgian Empire' to describe the European Union. He was joking, of course, and my how we laughed!

"Gold Plating" is the practice of getting an order (a 'directive') from our masters in the European Union and adding lot of additional regulations to it. Sort of...

"If this arbitrary order has not destroyed your business we will add regulations to it, and we will keep doing so until you are destroyed"...

..."Why are we trying to destroy you?"...

..."Well what else do we have to do, it would be lazy and unethical to just sit in our offices and not do anything".

The British Civil Service is supposed to love gold plating more than any other civil service in the EU. The British Civil Service having long prided itself on being more hardworking an ethical than Civil Servants in other nations (do not even think about bribing a British Civil Servant to save your business - he would rather starve than let you survive).

Examples are tossed about, supposedly a Directive on slaughter houses that started off as about 8 pages in Brussels (EU HQ) was turned in to about 7 pages in France - and about 97 pages in Britain.

No surprise that almost all of the little local slaughter houses closed down.

The BBC (and other such) still has the occasional item about how sad it is the all the local family owned places have gone, and how animals are now taken to great corporate factories (which actually have worse records for the quality and safety of meat). The little places may not have understood the paper work or been able to afford all the special people the regulations insisted they have (such vets - mostly from Spain) - but they did the job better. "Oh the wicked supermarkets" (they get the blame for destroying the "local food" from "local farmers" system that the media claim to love) "and now on to our next story about the need for more regulations concerning such and such".

Well the British Conservative party has promised to end gold plating and if a business thinks that a EU directive has been interpreted more strictly in Britain than in other parts of the EU (or just used as an excuse for another regulation orgy) they will be able to take the matter to court.

Well this is good as far as it goes. The promise to end gold plating is nice to hear (although I doubt the Civil Service would take any notice) and taking things to court might work sometimes - although the British courts (like the courts of most nations) are a mess (and getting worse - as they slowly reject what is left of the old 'out of date' principles of law).

However, it is also a wonderful way for the British Conservative party to look as if they are "doing something" about regulations and "standing up for Britain". After all by concentrating on 'gold plating' the Conservatives duck the issue of whether to defy ANY of the endless thousands of Directives that come out of the EU.

Too cynical? I hope so.

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (a sympathiser of Italian terrorist organisations in the 1970s and imprisoned as such) wrote Empire, a book that purported to demonstrate a new concept of Empire sans imperialism, engaging with the ongoing march of globalisation. This book came to my attention at its publication when Hardt was interviewed on Radio 3; since the BBC viewed post-Marxist critiques and other explorations of jargon as vital contributions to high culture. It was theory-laden and empirically light, a strange attempt on the part of the Left to accept a 'theory of globalisation' by condemning all nationalism as reactionary. Even the Marxists found this theoristic verbiage too much to take.

Still, old Reds have never lost their airbrush, as this quote demonstrates:

The legacy of modernity is a legacy of fratricidal wars, devastating "development", cruel "civilization" and previously unimagined violence. Erich Auerbach once wrote that tragedy is the only genre that can properly claim realism in Western literature, and perhaps this is true precisely because of the tragedy Western modernity has imposed on the world. Concentration camps, nuclear weapons, genocidal wars, slavery, apartheid; it is not difficult to enumerate the various scenes of the tragedy....

Modern negativity is located not in any transcendant realm but in the hard reality before us: the fields of patriotic battles in the First and Second World wars, from the killing fields at Verdun to the Nazi furnaces and the swift annihilation of thousands in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the carpet bombing of Vietnam and Cambodia, the massacres of Setif and Soweto to Sabra and Shatila, and the list goes on and on. There is no Job who can sustain such suffering!

Can you see the "hard reality" that they missed?

Glenn Reynolds gets in line with Samizdata, bridging the gap between your humble poster's musings on big media and the current kerfuffle over Kerry's account of his adventures in Vietnam.

But this story seems to me to be absolutely fascinating in that it reveals just how in the tank for the Democrats the mainstream media are, and how little the vaunted Cronkitean claims of objectivity and research and factual accuracy really mean when the chips are down.

To me, that's a bigger deal than the underlying issue or even, in some ways, the election itself. Elections come and go, politicians come and go, and pretty much all of them turn out to be disappointments one way or another. But the "Fourth Estate" is a big part of the unelected Permanent Government that in many ways does more to run the country than the politicians.

Glenn does more than any professional journalist that I know of to bring together the public information on stories that catch his eye. His work on the Kerry "Christmas in Cambodia" story has been first-rate.

I have always suspected the notion blogging will lead us into a wonderful future of 'participatory democracy' was one of those ideas which withers away to nothing under closer scrutiny. Sure, we can 'fact check the asses' (as Ken Layne put it) of the established political/media classes but that only makes us bloggers 'participants' in the sense that calling the cops when the party next door is making too much noise makes you a 'participant' in the next door's party.

The dependably readable William Sjostrom takes an article in the Daily Telegraph decrying the fact British students are in debt and turns it on its head:

My central point remains this: why do newspapers, staffed by people who happily go into debt to buy cars and homes, write as if students are clearly worse off going into debt to pay for university education?

Why indeed?

I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who overcomes his enemies.
- Aristotle

Samizdatista Jackie Danicki spotted an interesting fact that well known writer and commentator Theodore Dalrymple is now a contributor to the Social Affairs Unit blog, publishing under his real name, Dr Anthony Daniels. The SAU has scored quite a coup by getting such an excellent contributor signed up.

The blogosphere continues its march into the mainstream.

Over on the Adam Smith Institute blog, there is another article on why outsourcing ends up actually creates job in the country doing the outsourcing. The author makes the obvious statement that:

Machine diggers took the jobs of workmen with spades. At the time, there were people who objected. But on that basis, should we create jobs by replacing each man with a spade with 50 men using teaspoons? Despite specific jobs being lost, the total number of jobs has increased.

Quite! This seems an emotive subject for those who fear their jobs will end up in India but as the comments on this blog have demonstrated when we have discussed outsourcing in the past, it is hard to make a convincing argument that outsourcing is anything other than a positive thing for an advanced western economy.

The other day the Daily Mail, a British tabloid newspaper written for the statist right prejudices of 'Indignant of Tunbridge Well', called for certain video games to be banned. This resulted is a rather splendid riposte by Benet Simon in The Spectator called Ban this evil rag!':

But before you panic, remember that you’re better off trusting your child than the Daily Mail. Over the last few days I have been checking the Mail’s website discussion board to see what sort of response they have been getting to their call for a ban. At first, scores of anti-censorship postings appeared, many of them pointing out a fact that the Mail had omitted to mention in either of its two front-page stories: the murderous game, Manhunt, wasn’t in fact owned by the killer Leblanc but by his victim. Another popular complaint was that the Mail had entirely ignored a statement by the police which said that Leblanc’s motive for the so-called ‘Manhunt murder’ was certainly robbery. The kid had debts, it seems, was into drugs and killed to pay for his habit. The police went on to assert that they had never made any connection between the crime and the video game. The Mail’s response to these letters was to delete them while leaving the comments from concerned mothers who won’t let their children watch Spiderman for fear that they’ll think they can climb down walls.

Indeed... my comments were amongst those they deleted from the thread on the Daily Mail forum entitled Discuss: Should violent video games be banned?. And now that it has turned into an embarrassing fiasco for them given the overwhelming response to the contrary, they seem to have since deleted the entire thread.

It seems that 'Indignant of Tunbridge Wells' is a gamer too.

* = 'Gib' being an expression used by computer gamers for blowing a person into bloody chunks.

This article from the Washington Post, on the application of the little known Data Quality Act to hobble the regulatory leviathan, is full of unintentional insights. The Data Quality Act is, well, let the Post tell it, and let the insights begin!

The Data Quality Act -- written by an industry lobbyist and slipped into a giant appropriations bill in 2000 without congressional discussion or debate -- is just two sentences directing the OMB to ensure that all information disseminated by the federal government is reliable.

The first insight is, of course, the clonking great pro-government, pro-regulation bias that the Post brings to this story. Note the disparaging terms applied to this piece of legislation, which has a genesis and a pedigree that is totally ordinary - most legislation is the product of interested parties, and most finds its way onto the books via massive omnibus bills that no one reads. However, these routine facts of Washington life are given ominous prominence only when the media outlet is opposed to whatever was done. The rest of the story is riddled with similar bias - in the Post's world, regulation is always good, always to protect the people, never fails a cost-benefit test, always supported by the preponderance of the scientific evidence, etc.

The next set of unintentional insights comes to us when the relatively innocuous purpose of the Act collides with the prerogatives of the regulatory state.

But many consumers, conservationists and worker advocates say the act is inherently biased in favor of industry. By demanding that government use only data that have achieved a rare level of certainty, these critics maintain, the act dismisses scientific information that in the past would have triggered tighter regulation.

First, of course, note who the Post asks for their opinion. Of equal interest is the rather revealing admission that, in the past, regulation was apparently handed down on the basis of information that was, how to put this, of less than adequate quality. Declining to regulate because the data isn't there is, of course, a Bad Thing.

These final comments surely need no elaboration.

"It's a tool to clobber every effort to regulate," said Rena Steinzor, a professor of law and director of the Environmental Law Clinic at the University of Maryland. "In my view, it amounts to censorship and harassment." . . . .

Yet Steinzor, the Maryland environmental lawyer, and other critics complain that the OMB's involvement politicizes the process. The expertise of the handful of scientists hired by Graham, they say, cannot match that of the thousands of experts on agency staffs.

One of the interesting but un-noticed thing about world affairs is that, for all the wealth that traffic in oil is able to generate, the nations that produce it are not high up on the list of nice places to be. Not many people consider Saudi Arabia, Iran, Nigeria, or Russia to be desirable places to go for a holiday, never mind live. In an odd twist to the old folks tale that 'money won't make you happy', it is pretty clear that oil wealth is not particularly useful in solving the problems of a nation.

Nancy Birdsall and Arvind Subramanian did notice it however and wrote a 5,000 word essay on the subject, with Iraq in mind, for Foreign Affairs magazine (preview here) What they noted was that oil wealth tends to corrupt the state, and since it has an easy stream of revenue at its disposal, it does not have to work so hard at gouging its citizens. So it also has no incentive to promote property rights as a way of creating wealth. And those that control the state, control the wealth.

Therefore, you get the distressing sight of the President of Chad spending the first instalment of his country's oil wealth on a new Presidential jet for example. More recently, in Russia we see President Putin using state power to attack the oil-enriched oligarchs. And Nigeria seems to have been actively impoverished by its oil wealth, as the 'Pirates in Power' have skimmed $100 billion over the years. Oil wealth is not particularly healthy for democracies, either.

How to escape the curse? Merely privatising the oil sector does not work very well in states where the concept of 'property rights' is a shaky one at best (see Russia). Another attempt has been to create special 'oil funds' with constitutional restrictions on the way the money is used. This has been used in many different places. But again, the strength of the rule of law is the decisive thing. Chad had a 'oil fund' but the President still got his airplane.

Birdsall and Subramanian instead advocate the novel idea of distributing the oil wealth directly to the citizens. This means that every citizen of the nation gets an annual cheque from the oil company. For Iraq, this idea has many wonderful features. In the first place, Iraqi citizens get a real stake in their government, and will be not inclined to support Islamist or separatist groups who wish to smash the state for their own nefarious purposes.

Secondly, all Iraqis get the same cut. A struggling farmer, a Mad Mullah, or an educated doctor- each of them get the same thing. No complaints about the system getting rorted in favour of one ethnic group or another.

And best of all, ordinary Iraqis will get prosperous at the expense of the government. There will not be rivers of gold for a class of local 'social planners' to waste, and the government will have to work hard to sell the need for tax increases to fund their operations. This means that citizens can look the state in the eye. And tell it where to get off, too.

In Denial: Historians, Communism & Espionage
J.E. Haynes & H. Klehr
Encounter Books, San Francisco, 2003

"We should recognize the issue of communism and Soviet espionage has become an antiquarian backwater. After all, the Cold War is over." With these words, a typical leftish US historian, Ellen Schrecker, recommends that a whole sector of an historical era should be ignored and work on it effectively closed down. "It is time to move on," remarks another academic, using the modern terminology that neither denies nor accepts responsibility, but leaves a mess behind for someone else to clear up. Now historians are, by definition, paddlers up backwaters, investigators of things that are "over" and move in, not move on when invited to examine data never before available. When World War Two ended historians started, not stopped, writing about it, just as an unending stream of books about Napoleon has continued in the nearly two centuries since he was bundled off to St Helena. The idea that, just as enormous quantities of material from Soviet and other archives are being released, work on them should be called off is so ludicrous that it could only have been suggested by those who feel the foundations of their beliefs and attitudes crumbling beneath their feet. However, though public apathy is what they would like, the hard facts, and writers such as Haynes and Klehr, have forced some response.

According to the authors of In Denial, the two examples quoted are not isolated oddities, but characteristic of the mindset of a large, perhaps predominant section of US academic historians. Certainly those they cite, or otherwise mention, whom I list at the end of this review, make up a considerable body. They also must include at least the majority of the editors of The American Historical Review and The Journal of American History which rarely publish articles critical of Communism, or have done for the past 25 years at least. Yet these two must be distinguished from Radical History Review which avowedly "rejects conventional notions of scholarly neutrality and objectivity' (p. 44)". The Encyclopedia of the American Left omits such matters as the large subsidies the Soviet Union transmitted to the American Communists, specifically for subversion (pp 70-72), the evidence that Alger Hiss spied for the Soviet Union (p. 106), indeed that American Communists had anything to do with espionage, even after opened Soviet files had massively documented the fact that this was so. After all, if something is in print in an accepted reference work, as the Encyclopedia is, it becomes history - an interesting example of history being written by the losers, for a change. Why, though, did the editors of the "highly prestigious", 24 volume American National Biography for its entry on the Rosenberg spies commission a Communist academic who then, not surprisingly, brushed aside recent confirmatory evidence of their guilt as "discredited" (p. 104)?

Just as with the denial of its acceptance of Soviet subsidies, there has been a strong attempt by leftish historians (termed by Haynes and Klehr "revisionists") to absolve the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) from the accusation that its policy slavishly followed that of the USSR. In fact, any sign of independence was smacked down by Stalin himself (p. 135) and the leaders who claimed their position by right of election were expelled at his orders from the CPUSA, which published the reason for it in a pamphlet. The Party's endorsement of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact was unconditional and it opposed bitterly all attempts by Roosevelt to help Britain during the year when we stood alone (p. 133). Perhaps insufficient study has been made (I for one am not aware of any) of British Communist resistence to our own war effort during this vital period.

As evidence mounts of subversion and spying by American Communists on behalf of the USSR, some of their defenders have moved from denial to approval, if not always of their actions, certainly of their motives, while any attempt to stop them, let alone punish them "is part and parcel of vile McCarthyism (p. 207)." The Rosenbergs, Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White (the last two very high White House officials) are now defended as pure idealists who wanted to make the world safer by sharing secrets with the Soviets - a one-way traffic, of course. Longtime defenders of the Rosenbergs "have reacted to the new evidence with a confused mixture of denial, acceptance and defiance (p. 198)". In New York there is even an Alger Hiss Chair of Social Studies, appropriately filled by one Joel Kovel who proclaims that the United States is the "enemy of humanity (p. 211)". White is, so to speak, being whitewashed in a forthcoming book by, it is disconcerting to read, someone who has got about as far up as it is possible to get in the directorship of a number of historical institutions (p. 212). Sometimes defenders want to have it both ways - Alger Hiss wasn't guilty (he still has defenders of his innocence, the case for which Haynes and Klehr still have to demolish on pp. 152-162), but if he was, it was only "in technical violation of the law (p. 195)". Other, now forgotten persons - such as Lauchline Currie (as highly placed as Hiss) and Theodore Hall (as important a spy as Klaus Fuchs) - get the same treatment. In case anyone thinks that the authors have limited their examination of American Communist spies to those discussed above, I have added a list of all (or perhaps I should say most) they have at least mentioned.

What is it that motivates people obviously intelligent enough to enter elite universities, pass their degree exams, research and write theses and books and gain tenured positions, and yet defend a political philosophy justifying regimes responsible for millions of deaths, aggressive wars, and a command economy inadequate for their needs? Is it too simple a solution to suggest that these are people so conscious of the the shortcomings of their own society that they idealise another? Thus "I wanted the Soviet Union to be a successful experiment in socialist democracy and so I checked my critical faculties . . . I still need that belief even if the particular vision I embraced has turned to ashes, (p. 42)" explains "post-Marxist feminist" Gerda Lerner, emeritus professor of History at the University of Wisconsin. But, though a refugee from Nazism and disillusioned with Communism, this has "done little to mitigate her loathing for the United States" and she has compared "life in America to living under Adolf Hitler." Incredible though this must sound to most people, it must be taken seriously as evidence of a certain state of mind. Unfortunately we are not given the parallels between her experiences in Austria and in America which might justify it. Others want to make America responsible for all the deaths caused by war since World War II, though including those at Hiroshima and Nagasaki for good measure (p. 49). That the Americans initiated none of these wars seems to be no excuse, nor is the far greater death toll brought about by Communist governments by engineered famines, labour camps and straightforward terror and genocide set against this so-called American guilt.

With nothing left to believe in, the default position of these leftish academics and intellectuals is a sort of nihilistic anti-Americanism. "We need a civil war, class war, whatever, to put an end to US policies that endanger all of us," declared Professor Robin Kelley after September 11th (p. 49). Who is going to fight whom with what is not explained. Presumably another American Civil War, by this logic, will persuade Al Qaida that terrorism is unnecessary, since America will destroy itself. Over here, Scott Lucas, hired to teach "American Studies" at Birmingham University, by his own confession taught "anti-American studies (p. 48)". He has not been alone, of course; anti-Americanism is perhaps America's largest intellectual export - and it is entirely negative. Its missionaries have no substitute to offer; if successful it would leave a moral and political power vacuum which only Islamic fanatics seem willing, if not able, to fill. Is that what those "in denial" want to happen?

The Academics etc:

Leslie Adler, Herbert Aptheker, Rudy Baker, Alexander Bittelman, Ethan Bronner, Michael Brown, Paul Buhle, Nicholas Callather, Michael Carley, Peter Carroll, David Caute, Blanche W. Cook, Bruce Craig, Marion Davis, Michael Denning, Eugene Dennis, Frederick V. Field, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Barbara Foley, Isaac Folkoff, Eric Foner, William Z. Foster, Grover Furr, Dan Georgakas, Marvin Gettleman, J. Arch Getty, Jacob Golos, Robert Griffith, Ruth Hall, Michael J. Heale, Gerald Horne, Jerry F. Hough, Peter M. Irons, Maurice Isserman, Edward Johanningsmeier, Michael Karni, Aaron Katz, Robert D.G. Kelley, Robin Kelly, Bernard Knox, Gabriel Kolke, Robert Korstat, Joel Kovel, Aileen Kraslitor, William Kunstler, Corliss Lamont, Gerda Lerner, Nelson Lichtenstein, Robbie Lieberman, George Lipstitz, John Lowenthal, Scott Lucas, Paul Lyons, Norman Markowitz, Robert Meeropol (ne Rosenberg), Mark Naison, Victor Navasky, Anna Kasten Nelson, Fraser Ottanelli, Herbert Packer, Michael F. Parrish, Thomas Paterson, James Patterson, William Pemberton, William Reuben, Alfred Rieber, Michael Rogin, James Ryan, Roger Sandilands, Bernice Schrank, Ellen Schrecker, Bernard Schuster, Samuel Sills, Gregory Silvermaster, Malcolm Silvers, Mark Solomon, Athan Theoharis, Robert Thurston, Brian Villa, Theodore Von Laue, Alan Wald, Max Weiss.

The Spies:

Iskhak Akmerov, Jacob Albam, Johanna Beker, Joseph Bernstein, Lucy Booker, Raymond Boyer, Harry Bridges, Earl Browder, Morris and Jack Childs, Judith Coplon, Lauchlin Currie, Laurence Duggan, Noel Field, Klaus Fuchs, John Gates, Eve Getsov, Harold Glasser, David and Ruth Greenglass, Gus Hall, Theodore Hall, Maurice Halperin, Alger Hiss, Felix Inslerman, Philip Jaffe, Joseph Katz, Charles Kramer, Harry Magdoff, Carl Marzani, Floyd Miller, Victor Perlo, Jozsef Peters, John Reed, Vincent Reno, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Andrew Roth, Alfred Sarant, Saville Sax, George Silverman, Robert Soblen, Jack and Myra Soble, Henry and Beatrice Spitz, Lincoln Steffens, Arthur and Martha Dodd Stern, William Ludwig Ullmann, Julian Wadleigh, Donald Wheeler, Harry Dexter White, Milton Wolfe, Ilya Wolston, Mark Zborowski, Jane Foster and George Zlatowski.

It was with something akin to delight that I saw the Times, not a newspaper overly concerned with civil liberties, have on its front page 1 an article about objections to Britain's developing surveillance state.

If we cannot get these issues out in the open, we will indeed see Britain 'sleepwalking' into what may some time in the future be a panoptic nightmare. Blair or Howard are not going to be having the security services doing 'midnight knocks' on the doors of those they disfavour (well, maybe for a few people in the Finsbury Park area) but make no mistake about it, the infrastructure of repression is being put in place at an astonishing rate and someday (hopefully long after I have decamped to New Hampshire) this information is going to be used by statists of both left and right with fewer qualms than Tony Blair to order every single aspect of people's lives in Britain in ways that places the state at the centre of everything you do in ways earlier totalitarianisms could only dream of... for your own good, of course.

We have a serious battle to win and the more these issues are out of the committee rooms and in the more general public arena, the better we can argue the case for resisting the emerging Panopticon State.

1 = Readers outside the UK may have difficulties accessing this link once it is archived due to the benighted policies of the Times newspaper.

(Cross posted from White Rose)

President Bush has announced, and not a moment too soon, that the US will undertake a massive reorganization of its overseas deployment, moving troops out of theatres where war no longer threatens (e.g., Europe). Apparently, most of the troops would be brought home to the US.

As I have noted before, the security guarantee that the US extends to its nominal allies can be counterproductive, encouraging irresponsibility and anti-American attitudes in such allies. For nations, as for individuals, there is no substitute for self-defence.

It is awfully strange behaviour for an imperial hyperpower, though, isn't it? Surely the evil Bushchimpler realizes that bringing troops home is no way to expand global hegemony. Whatever could he (or his puppetmaster Karl Rove) be thinking?

Update: Mark Steyn weighs in.

The case of Gayle Laverne Grinds highlights one of the most important issues of our time.

I wonder how many adverts for fatty, calorie-laden food this woman viewed during the six years she spent on the sofa in front of the television. I suppose the free marketeers would claim that exposure to these commercials had no bearing on the foods this woman consumed during her six years on the couch, and that she had the "personal responsibility" to choose not to eat them and to choose not to soil herself every day. But public health experts predict that by 2010, one person in three will die this way, and that 72 per cent of all schoolchildren will be one with sofas of their own. With increased funding for public education on the dangers of sofas and junk food, those rates could be substantially reduced. As it is, the government departments in charge of such education are criminally underfunded - and still the right-wingers and libertarians cheer on as tax cuts for the wealthy kill us and kill our kids.

The real question is this: How many innocent people have to die after spending six years on the sofa, eating unhealthy food, defecating and sitting in a mound of their own filth before we put big business in its place and tell these fast food and junk food companies that they cannot continue to run roughshod over the public?

We consider this our duty - to defend humanity against the scourge of intolerance, violence, and fanaticism.
- Ahmed Shah Massoud

Judging by the many dreadful reviews I have seen regarding Catwoman, this should be a turkey of epic proportions.

Well... bollocks to that.

It actually is not that bad. Sure, even a connoisseur of B-movies such as myself can see that it is not a great movie... the special effects were pretty good in places but during some scenes it was painfully obvious that they were computer generated. The dialogue was serviceable rather than inspiring, the story was derivative and predictable with some feminist claptrap tacked on. The acting was of variable quality - Halle Berry's job was to shake her 'thang' and be alternatively sexy, confused, sexy, predatory, sexy, all of which she did to perfection; Ben Bratt's job was to shake his 'thang' and be a 'tough-but-nice-guy', which he did engagingly; Sharon Stone's job was to be sympathetic, unsympathetic, menacing and sexy, all of which she utterly failed to deliver which was rather disappointing.

But what strikes me is not the failings of this flick, which are indeed many, but the fact I found it vastly better than the reviews would have lead me to believe. It was by no means a waste of a few quid/bucks/euros and just confirms my suspicions that for most reviewers, sneering at things is a safer and more 'credible' option, a default mode in fact.

It is not a great movie, or even a particularly good movie... it just does not suck. Bored this weekend? You could do far worse than look at the exquisite Halle Berry strutting her stuff very effectively in Catwoman.