Labour takes money from Sun readers and gives it to Guardian readers, who then decide how best it should be spent.
– Richard Littlejohn
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September 21st, 2002 | Comments are closed
 The Labour government is dropping heavy hints about further tax increases in order to fund what it euphamistically refers to as ‘redistribution of wealth, power and opportunity’. Pure, coal-filtered, organic bullshit with no artificial additives or flavourings. What they really want to do is loot more money from productive wealth-creating people and hand it over to their parasitical, wealth-destroying supporters in the public sector. Of all the high-falutin’ media responses to this, none hits the nail so squarely on the head as Richard Littlejohn in The Sun:
You call it exactly the way you see it, Richard. And you see it the way it is. September 20th, 2002 | Comments are closed
 Because I expect it to get negligible coverage in the mainstream media, I feel obliged to remind everyone that grassroots Britain goes on the march this Sunday. The Samizdata Team will be duly represented and, if you wish to join us we will be meeting with several others of a like mind at Hyde Park Corner at 09.45am Sunday morning. September 20th, 2002 | Comments are closed
Insights come in varied and peculiar forms, such as those decanted from the lips of such British sages as Rab C. Nesbit to the north and the Macc Lads from a tad further south. To be honest I think the Macc Lads are at least as reliable as DEBKA when it comes to military analysis and probably rather better… well certainly more forthright. Read the article and make up your own mind.
Before you read the linked Spectator article, let me proffer some linguistic assistance to our non-British readers… ‘Boddingtons’ is an inexpensive but far from ineffective beer in considerable favour with the broader end of Britain’s socioeconomic pyramid. September 20th, 2002 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
I can’t comment on whether or how guilty or dangerous the alleged terrorist ring is, but some statements, such as the following from Fox News just make me laugh:
Now please tell me why finding a rifle and a sight in a house in Pennsylvania is unusual? I grew up in a small town in Western PA, and it would have been closer to news if they entered a random house and didn’t find an entire cabinet full of rifles, shotguns, ammunition and assorted sights and accessories. It just makes you cringe to read this kind of idiocy. Erratum: Lackawanna is across the border in New York state, not in Pennsylvania. September 20th, 2002 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
The attempt by statist corporations to allow their Big Media interests to hack your computer with the US government’s blessing is moving into high gear with the Berman bill.
Ah yes, blesséd democracy… in fact the finest democracy money can buy. Of course what idiots like Professor Miller do not seem to grasp is that it is not “the essence of capitalism” at all: the essence of capitalism is allowing market forces (i.e. capital) to determine what is or is not a viable business model. By arguing that the state should prop up what is clearly becoming a non-viable business model (the existing music business), Miller is describing not capitalism but statist stasis based economic systems like socialism and fascism. Miller is free to propose what he likes for the benefit of th existing structure of Big Music but to describe propping it up with restrictive, innovation destroying, market mechanism deadening laws as “The essence of capitalism” suggests to me that perhaps the article has a typo and he is in fact a Professor of Ergonomics. And that is without even considering the civil liberties aspects to this.
Also does anyone seriously think that if this law makes it onto the books in the USA that Big Music will restrict its Denial of Service Attacks and direct hacks to computers and networks in the USA? You must be joking. Of course two can play at that game, fellahs. Hackers are a moving target… which cannot be said for the corporations now threatening to hack personal computers by the million. I wonder if the next ‘shot heard around the world’ will be fired at the state backed corporates from ten thousand keyboards of people who have finally seen an intrusion too far. We will just have to wait and see. September 20th, 2002 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
There is something extremely endearing about a blogger (or Blogatrice, to be accurate) who lists amongst her many personal interests:
Go visit her new site at sashacastel.com! September 20th, 2002 | Comments are closed
I finally found the right Microsoft compatible audio codec for Linux and have watched the video of Netanyahu’s press conference which I discussed yesterday. I must admit I am impressed. I’d never before got the measure of the man. If your opinions of him, like mine, were formed by watching the BBC or other evening news, I highly recommend you take the time to listen. He is a very strong defender of Freedom of Speech. I think he should get his own blog. He’d fit in nicely with the rest of us. September 20th, 2002 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
Now corporate promotional calenders featuring scantily clad ladies draped over the company’s products is hardly a new or unusual concept… expect when the company in question is an Italian manufacturer of coffins! This article has induced me to add a new category to samizdata.net (see category archives) called ‘How very odd!’. September 20th, 2002 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
The essential problem of campaigning for the proliferation of handguns is the same as for proliferating nuclear weapons. The suspicion that the first million people who would choose to take advantage of the restoration of legal handgun ownership in the United Kingdom are precisely the million people least trustworthy with such weapons. The assumption behind the global crusade to keep nukes in the hands of a global establishment is the same as that which would only allow state officials to carry guns. Yet we have a case example of how nuclear proliferation need not make the world less safe: India and Pakistan. Both sides have governments that are itching for war: the Indian nationalist government believes it would win a conventional war and the Pakistani military regime stands to gain legitimacy from a show of force against India. There is a balance of terror which ensures that neither side has opted for all-out war, as well as keeping neutral bystanders concerned enough to pressure both sides into staying within certain bounds. Even deranged leaders seem to accept the balance of terror. One of the curious differences between the First and Second World Wars was the use of battlefield chemical weapons. Civilians in London and Paris carried gas masks during the early months of the second world war in the expectation of gas attacks by the German air force. No such attacks were made because Hitler believed that the British would retaliate (the British government planned to use anthrax bombs). As a libertarian internationalist, I have no problem with free countries liberating the unfree, by deposing tyrants. I support a global assault on leftist, fundamentalist, racial supremacist and eco-terrorists. However, I have misgivings about wars started to impose global gun control, especially as this is so selective: why no war to disarm North Korea, Israel, India, Pakistan, or France? Would Australia be a target, or Brazil, Morocco, Turkey, Japan, Germany and Iran if they planned nuclear weapons programmes? I have a theory that nuclear powers are simply not allowed to develop crack-pot governments: one way or another they are weeded out. If true one could say “A nuclear armed society is a VERY polite society.” September 20th, 2002 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
Intellectual property rights are a hot issue now, probably because there are at least two distinct intellectual and political traditions who want to talk about them. The left are having a huge push about (especially) pharmaceutical patents in the third world as Alex Knapp of Heretical Ideas reported last Sunday. So does this press release about a new book that also contests such notions. Meanwhile many libertarians are particularly interested in the impact of the new instant copying technology that is now spreading to every other desk on earth. It used to be quite an effort to photocopy a book (although even that got the patent lawyers and lobbyists very jumpy). Now you can copy whole movies in minutes, and individual music tracks in seconds. Entire industries are tottering. But hot issue or not, the Libertarian Alliance will always be interested in publishing a piece like Nigel Meeks’s An Individualist Anarchist Critique of ‘Intellectual Property’: The Views of Benjamin Tucker (1854-1939) (Libertarian Heritage Number 23). Follow the link and read all of it (although I’m embarrassed to say that we are still only producing our stuff in Acrobat format, a situation I hope very soon to correct). This piece is the ideal introduction to Tucker’s ideas about how ideas should, and more particularly should not, be protected. → Continue reading: New from the Libertarian Alliance: Benjamin Tucker and intellectual property rights September 20th, 2002 | Comments are closed
A ‘Bear Of Very Little Brain’ such as I does not quite follow every twist and turn of the A-Level scandal, but the story goes something like this: the government wants more students in higher education for good reasons and bad. So the government puts direct and indirect pressure on the exam boards to make the exams easier by changing their mark schemes and structures. This manouevre is kept secret; they would like us to think that they have made students cleverer by good magic. The ruse does not work. As grades go up and up people start to talk about “dumbing down.” Finally the jump in the number of A grades is so embarrassing that the exam board start secretly moving the goalposts. This is a betrayal of trust: even if the level of achievement necessary for a good grade is objectively set too low, once the board has publicly stated the criteria it is bound to stick to them as part of its contract. To secretly mark students down is close to libel. What a mess, hey? What’s a poor Education Minister to do? In an article called Estelle, here is your way out of this mess the Telegraph’s John Clare puts forward his advice to the beleaguered Estelle Morris. But I’ve got some even better advice. I know a breathtakingly simple way for Estelle to get out of this mess entirely. It’s this: Get out of this mess entirely, Estelle! Yes! It’s that easy! Kick over your ministerial desk, make a barbecue of all your papers, hurl your dispatch box over the balustrade of the magnificent interior balcony of Sanctuary Buildings, and be gone and free within the hour. I don’t just mean resign. I mean make your last act the complete and inalienable renunciation of government interference in A Levels, AS Levels, right through to X, Y and Z Levels, with every record so much as touching upon the subject shredded or electronically wiped to make sure your courageous decision sticks. Because government interference is the only cause of all this mess and government butting out is the only cure. September 20th, 2002 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
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