We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Baseball player Andres (“Big Cat“) Gallarraga is fighting non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and making a new name for himself by writing a book about how non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma can be fought. As the Baby Boom gets ever older, expect more relatively young celebs to make their diseases public in order to appeal to this disintegrating demographic.
India’s Central Administrative Tribunal (CAT has been busy ensuring that ladies trying to become constables do not get unfair treatment in Chandigarh.
UPI has this, about Cat Stevens:
Washington, DC, Jan. 13 (UPI) – The singer Cat Stevens was denied entry to the United States because of money he had given to terrorist linked groups, a U.S. official said.
“If you contribute to terrorist organizations, I’m sorry, but you’re not welcome in the United States … And that’s what happened to Cat Stevens,” Robert Bonner, customs and border protection commissioner told United Press International Thursday.
Mystery has surrounded the case of the singer since federal officials diverted a Washington-bound flight he was on to Bangor, Maine, last September. He was deported after being questioned.
Jaguar’s Big Cat is best in show.
WYTV reports that CAT scanning is old hat:
With today’s medical technology, it’s possible to see pain, to stand outside the body and examine the tiniest muscles and thinnest tissues inside us.
Thank the magic of magnetism or MRI, magnetic resonance imaging, a technology developed about 20 years ago as a new way to see inside ourselves.
…
As the CAT scan exposes bone, the MRI looks at softer targets. The MRI shows two kidneys; the left one has one artery feeding it, its twin has two.
Hacienda Luisita’s CAT is Luzon’s biggest sugar refinery, but, says Tarlac News, there is trouble brewing there. At the mill, I should say. That would be in the Philippines, right?
A high speed cat, the WestPac Express, is helping out with the Tsunami relief effort in Thailand:
US military officials also said the shallow draft and speed of the vessel allowed it to ferrying relief supplies quickly and efficiently to many different types of ports.
WestPac’s captain, Ken Kujala, said it took only minutes to begin to unload cargo, using the vessel’s roll on, roll off ramp.
“Most of our missions support training … but we’re doing something different this time,” said Captain Kujala. “Everyone …will jump through hoops to get the job done.”
Imagine it, a catamaran jumping through a hoop.
BMS-CAT is a Texas based recovery firm, and it has been busy in Hawaii, after the flooding there.
This story evidently started out with a misprint in its headline. Google has the original link as “USA Today Highlights iPod’s Importance to Cat Stereo Makers”. But they meant car. Jaguars especially?
CAT news from Kolkata:
KOLKATA, JAN 7: The Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, has decided to accept Common Admission Test (CAT) and Graduate Record Examination (GRE) scores from candidates seeking admission to its one-year post graduate programme in management.
I know what you are thinking. Cats are not machines or acronyms, they are, first, last and always, four legged mammals. So I will end with news about Tropical Storm, son of Storm Cat:
Maiden winner Tropical Storm, a four-year-old son of Storm Cat, has been acquired by Roger and Jane Braugh’s NewLife Stud and will stand stud the 2005 season at a Central Kentucky farm yet to be determined.
Catisfied?
The Guardian reports today on an announcement from Tom Ridge, to the effect that a quick fix has been put in place by the US government to allow low risk passengers to get on and off their airplane’s more quickly:
Acknowledging that travellers resented the stringent security checks at US airports, he announced that “low risk” flyers to John F Kennedy New York would be allowed to register their fingerprints and other biometric details so that they could avoid the long queues at Schiphol by stopping at a fast check kiosk.
The Guardian complains only about how it is Schiphol that is getting the benefit of the new arrangements, rather than Heathrow, making the story a hook for another cheap gibe about American geography knowledge.
This is a perfect example of the way the world now works. This register is voluntary, but the process is now well in hand to enable the authorities everywhere in due course to demand such information from everyone, as a condition of international travel. How long before it starts being claimed that an unwillingness to register is an admission that one is a high risk flyer?
If you doubt this, read the rest of the story:
He said the system was based on that used for frequent flyers on US domestic flights.
He told Associated Press in Amsterdam: “The main advantage to the United States will come if this program successfully and efficiently moves traffic through and other countries say: ‘We ought to apply this on a much broader basis.'”
Precisely. We are rapidly entering a world in which the world’s various Big Brothers know our every move. Our best hope will be that, on the whole, Big Brother does not care.
It is entirely my fault. Because I have failed to read the Dave Barry blog as regularly as I should, I can only now tell you of the link to this crucial news story, published as long ago as last Saturday:
Stressing hygiene and health, it showed various state-approved short hairstyles including the “flat-top crew cut,” “middle hairstyle,” “low hairstyle,” and “high hairstyle” – variations from one to five centimetres in length.
The programme allowed men aged over 50 seven centimetres of upper hair to cover balding.
It stressed the “negative effects” of long hair on “human intelligence development”, noting that long hair “consumes a great deal of nutrition” and could thus rob the brain of energy.
Good to see that comb-overs will still be allowed, within reasonable limits.
A second, and unprecedented, TV series this winter showed hidden-camera style video of “long-haired” men in various locations throughout Pyongyang.
In a break with North Korean TV’s usual approach, the programme gave their names and addresses, and challenged the fashion victims directly over their appearance.
The North Korean media normally reserves the reporting of names of its citizens to exemplary individuals who show high communist virtues.
Typical media. Why can they not show good news, instead of harping on about bad stuff all the time?
“No matter how good the clothes, if one does not wear tidy shoes, one’s personality will be downgraded.”
For party papers such as Nodong Sinmun, the struggle against foreign and anti-communist influence is being fought out in the arena of personal appearance.
“People who wear other’s style of dress and live in other’s style will become fools and that nation will come to ruin,” it says.
Some people evidently do have long hair in North Korea, despite the danger of their personalities being downgraded, and the nation definitely is coming to ruin. But might they not be confusing correlation with causation?
Personally I suspect that this robbed North Korea of a lot more energy than long hair does.
And the North Korean government campaign to stamp out smoking has apparently not worked very well, so I expect long hair in North Korea to go on being an official worry for some time yet.
Via Natalie Solent, I got to this Guardian report that Waterstone’s has sacked one of its staff, for blogging:
A bookseller has become the first blogger in Britain to be sacked from his job because he kept an online diary in which he occasionally mentioned bad days at work and satirised his “sandal-wearing” boss.
Joe Gordon, 37, worked for Waterstone’s in Edinburgh for 11 years but says he was dismissed without warning for “gross misconduct” and “bringing the company into disrepute” through the comments he posted on his weblog.
Published authors and some of the 5 million self-published bloggers around the globe said it was extraordinary that a company advertising itself as a bastion of freedom of speech had acted so swiftly to sack Mr Gordon, who mentions everything from the US elections to his home city of Edinburgh in the satirical blog he writes in his spare time.
My main opinion about this case is that, in a form of wording that I often use on these occasions, an employer should have the right to fire an employee if he has taken a dislike to the colour of her eyes, provided there is no contract which between them which says otherwise. It is their money. If they want to stop giving it to an employee, fair enough.
But what you are, or should be, entitled to do legally is not the same as what is managerially advisable. Which leads me to my second opinion about this case, again a generic one rather than specific to it, which says that there may be more to this case than meets the eye, and more reasons for the Waterstone’s decision than have so far been made public. This is also (in connection with my opinings here) what I think when I hear that some child has been chucked out of a school for flicking a rubber band at a another pupil. Maybe there was more to it than that, and the rubber band was just the final straw, so to speak. And maybe this blogger has been a pain in the arse to his bosses for years, and a useless bookseller, and they finally said: get rid of the tosser.
(And maybe – just maybe you understand – this chap really does need therapy.)
For me, one of the big arguments in favour of the free society is that people are allowed to make their own decisions about who they associate with, instead of having such decisions made for them by a mob, or by a tyrant, acting on the basis of more or less misleading scraps of information about the case that the contending parties have squirted into the public realm. As part of the mob, we in the blogosphere can beat our drums and argue about cases like this in loud voices, but in the end, we should not be deciding these things.
Nevertheless … (and you saw that coming a mile away, did you not?) … nevertheless … if a bookshop chain is not the kind of enterprise which ought to have employees blogging up a storm, about books, about the pleasures of literacy, and about anything else on their minds, with all the arguing and occasional public rows that this would inevitably involve when the storminess got too stormy … what I am saying is: bookshops and blogging ought to go very well together.
Maybe Waterstone’s regard employee bloggers as a menace to their interests far more profound any menace to their interests presented by this one blogger, and they made a huge decision of principle here. Maybe, but I doubt it. My guess would be that they had no idea what a s***storm would explode around them. I think they have no conception of what a force the Internet could be, for their business or against it.
I hope the blogosphere gets Waterstone’s to think through – rethink through – what they really think about blogging, and about the Internet in general. If they do not, they could find themselves at war with the Internet out of sheer carelessness. And thus miss a big chance to sell lots of books.
As it is, I can see a lot of people switching to Amazon because of this, and that too would be their perfect legal right.
We have said it before, but it bears repetition, that the coming EU referendum campaign will be the first internet campaign in our history and I remain convinced that the material on the net will have a decisive impact on the course of the campaign.
– Richard North, already quoted and linked to by Patrick Crozier as a response to my gloomier posting here
I find this all too persuasive. George Trefgarne sketches out how Tony Blair could win not only the next election by a mile, but then the Euro-referendum by enough to settle the matter for ever.
Key towards-the-end paragraph:
As the polls start to switch, other arguments are deployed by the pro-constitution lobby, of which the most potent is that the real choice is between ratifying the constitution, with all its disadvantages, or being reduced to a colonial outpost of George W Bush’s America. Scare stories are spread that withdrawing would also mean the end to cheap flights to France and Spain. Then, in March 2006, a referendum results in a Yes vote, by 52 per cent to 48 per cent – and Teflon Tony will have done it again.
At the heart of Trefgarne’s view of Britain now is the utter and continuing hopelessness of the Conservatives.
I confess that once upon a time I expected that America would be an issue to unite the Conservatives while still dividing Labour. But for many months now the Conservatives have been as split about America as they are about everything else. This means that they will remain a shambles for the foreseeable future, and that they will be in no state to argue persuasively against all that “colonial outpost of Bush’s America” stuff, as and when it comes on stream. Even more than now, I mean.
Severe irony has swept the northern parts of Britain over this weekend. Samizdata readers may be interested to know that Britain, the north of it especially, has been afflicted with flooding caused by the old fashioned method: a lot of water dropping out of the sky, all of it trying to use the same rivers.
It has also been extremely windy. It has been fairly breezy down here in London.
The city of Carlisle, the most northerly habitation in England, has been especially hard hit. Last night, the place with without any power, and tonight I heard a TV weather person predicting more rain for the area. There have been casualties, but the deaths so far are in single figures and look like they will stay that way.
[Correction!! Carlisle is NOT the most northern place in England. See comments 3, with a link to a map, and 4. I had at the top right of the Anglo-Scottish border but it is at the bottom left. Apologies.)
Under the circumstances, this report, dated last Friday just as the city was filling up with water, is particularly ironic. It is about Carlisle’s efforts to collect money for the Asian Tsunami victims:
THE DEVASTATION wrought by the tsunami disaster was brought close to home this week as one Carlisle woman waits for news of her missing brother, another family recovers from the trauma they suffered, and thousands contribute to fundraising.
Disaster caused by un welcome water was about to be brought a little closer to home even than that.
Musicians and singers Will Harris, James Formby, Martin Lee, Ben Gates and Tony Mason will perform in The Source tomorrow night at 8pm.
I do not think that this event was able to proceed as planned, and if anything similar is rearranged in the near future, I suspect that at least some of the proceeds will be distributed nearer home.
At Joanne Jacobs I learned about another of these teacher/pupil ruckuses where the teacher would appear to have behaved very stupidly.
17 year old Ahmad Al-Qloushi disagreed with his teacher, Professor Jospeh Woolcock, about America being great. Ahmad Al-Qloushi thinks it is. His teacher, Professor Joseph Woolcock, on the other hand, said to Ahmad Al-Qloushi that he needed therapy for expressing such an obviously bonkers opinion. The story is already bubbling away on the internet and will surely spread. Al-Qloushi has put his version of the story out there, and however much the Professor may curse, he cannot now reverse this. The Professor has filed a grievance, whatever exactly that means, against Al-Qloushi, for putting his, the Professor’s, name out there, but out there it is and out there it will now remain.
Whenever I hear about disagreements like this, I always think to myself: well, maybe the guy is a bit crazy. Maybe, in this case, the essay was a bit bonkers. And maybe Al-Qloushi had said and done other crazy things which he is forgetting about, and this essay was just the final straw in a hayrick of craziness that we are not hearing about. So, I am especially interested that in addition to reading Al’Qloushi’s complaint, we can also read the offending essay. → Continue reading: The lefty Professor versus the Arab college Republican president
Tony Blair is only one of many who has expressed amazement at the scale of the response by individuals to the Tsumani disaster.
Just why this particular disaster has, as they say, caught the imagination of the public is a complicated matter. It was photogenic, for one thing. More to the point, it was and is still being actually photographed. Lots of flattened towns and recycled amateur videos of the waves themselves crashing in on everything. That helped and still helps a lot. Like Dale Amon, I think that the media have made a huge difference. Indeed, I would say that this is the kind of situation when we see these people at their considerable best. And I like also to think that the Blogosphere in particular and the ‘new media’ in general were also helpful in communicating the story, as I have already written here. It must have further helped that many of those blogging or new-media-ing were able to do so in English, the lingua franca of the Aid-giving world.
The presence of tourists who are (or were) Just Like Us surely added to the sense of involvement many of us felt, and although people understandably derided headlines like this, the fact that celebrities had their holidays all disrupted brought it all that bit nearer home to us, surely. Call me shallow and Dianaficated – and knowing our commentariat I am sure several will – but this catastrophe only really impinged upon my feelings, as opposed to my numbed and astonished brain, when I learned that Lord Attenborough had lost his fourteen year old grand-daughter. Lord Attenborough is famous for his stellar film career, and also for his habit of crying on British TV for the most trifling of reasons. There will be fewer jokes about his crying now. His loss surely affected other feelings besides mine.
So, explaining this tidal wave, if you will pardon the metaphor, of freely donated money, as well as political money in response to the public mood, involves many different variables. But I would like to add a few more thoughts to the mix.
This catastrophe is, it seems to me, an exception to a rule which is now widely accepted among the donation-giving (as opposed to donation soliciting) classes. This rule is: that most of what passes for Foreign Aid these days is pointless, or worse. Personally I believe this, and I now believe that a lot of other people believe it too, and have believed it for some time. → Continue reading: Where did all this Tsunami money come from?
Here is another health scare to add to the pile. It seems that Pakistani cricketer Abdul Razzaq has been overdosing on … spinach:
Abdul Razzaq’s mysterious illness, that he suffered during the Melbourne Test, may be related to his curious addiction to spinach. Razzaq suffered a bout of vomiting, dizziness and breathing difficulties on the third morning of the Boxing Day Test and though he batted in the second innings, he hadn’t recovered fully in time for the final game at Sydney.
Razzaq had experienced dizziness and nausea during Pakistan’s tour of New Zealand, in early 2004, and he was put on a diet of spinach by a medical guru in Pakistan. “Somebody told him to have spinach all the time,” Zakir Khan, the Pakistan board’s operation manager, told The Melbourne Age. “So he loves spinach and wherever he goes he says spinach should be part of the diet, in Pakistan particularly. The other team-mates tease him and call him Popeye the Sailor Man.”
It is with such stories at this that I am now consoling myself for this fiasco.
Maybe I am making too much of this, but see what you think.
This is the blurb, from a leaflet that fell out of the latest edition of the Radio Times (so no link), for a movie that has just come out on DVD about the musician Ray Charles:
MUSICAL BIOGRAPHICAL DRAMA The early life of celebrated musician Ray Charles, from 1930-1966. Charles loses his sight at the age of seven – two years after his brother’s tragic drowning. Encouraged by his mother, he forges a successful career as a pianist and singer, fusing together gospel, R’n’B and soul. But despite overcoming his early setbacks, Charles becomes dogged by drug problems and the complications arising from his numerous affairs.
The bit I object to is where it says that Ray Charles was “dogged by drug problems”. I do not know the exact circumstance in which Ray Charles turned to drugs and do not know to what degree he is to be blamed for his drug problems, but one thing is surely true, namely that these problems were set in motion by things which he himself did, and by choices which he himself made. Yet the blurb writer (who I do think is blameworthy) makes these “problems” read like entirely separate creatures who sneaked up behind Ray Charles and mugged him, without him doing anything to provoke them at all. To use the phrase “dogged by drug problems” to describe Charles’ drug misfortunes is to imply that these misfortunes were not in any way self-inflicted. It is to switch from the active to the passive, from responsibility for action, to excuse. At least those “complications” that arose from his affairs are described as arising from his affairs, rather than just from thin air. And of course Ray Charles gets all the credit that he surely deserves for forging (in a good way) his career, for fusing this music with that (ditto), and for overcoming early (and horrendous) setbacks. So why the “dogged by drug problems” stuff? Why not “problems caused by his drug-taking”?
You hear this kind of language – the passive evasive tense, and the relabeling of forces actually set in motion by the victim of them, into external life forces with minds of their own – a lot. (I recall this man referring to such language a lot – link anyone?) And this matters, because if individuals are not going to be described as at all to blame for what are actually their – at least partly – self-inflicted misfortunes, it is all too likely that someone else – someone who at worst only contributed somewhat to these problems – will be held entirely responsible for them. Which is unjust.
When things are said badly, they are liable to be done badly.
[T]here is not much future in being a gatekeeper when the walls are down.
– the final words of this article by Jack Kelly about the travails of old school journalism
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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