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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Original content is nice, very nice, but it can take rather long to concoct. So it is that the lifeblood of the blogosphere is the copying and pasting, and linking to, of (pardon me if my prepositions are in a bit of a twist there) an online newspaper article, interspersed with some comment, hopefully shrewd and maybe sometimes well informed.
But what do I know about a story like this? I’m no anti-terrorist expert. Yet clearly it is of significance (as Alice Bachini also notes) that some bad people are apparently being pursued and captured by some good people, and that we are all somewhat safer as a result. Do we ignore events like this merely because we have nothing much to add?
Anti-terrorist officers are searching a second property close to the home of a suspected al-Qa’eda operative arrested yesterday.
The flat in Gloucester, near to Sajid Badat’s terraced house where explosives were found yesterday, is to undergo forensic examination. Officers executed a search warrant on the property at 1am this morning.
A police van was parked outside the second property, a shop with a flat above it. The shop, directly opposite a police station, was shut up but the curtains of its first-floor flat were open.
And so on. It seems that London’s Metropolitan Police (The Met, as we say here) were involved, which would strongly suggest that London was the target of all this explosive collecting, not some place in rural Gloucestershire.
So, speaking as a Londoner myself, and assuming as I now do that it wasn’t all planted … good!
News of some White Rose Relevant Modern Art. At one of my other places I expressed some uninformed prejudices (“messing about”, I called it, and a commenter took exception) about an artist called David Cotterrell, prejudices I still believe to be on the button, now that they are slightly better informed by me having browsed through this site.
Here, though, is a description of a David Cotterrell work, which brings together the worlds of art and of surveillance:
‘The Paranoia of a London Attache Case’ consists of seven twenty two minute video recordings playing concurrently. It was produced using the closed-circuit surveillance camera network within Monument/Bank Underground Station in the heart of the City of London.
The Installation tracks the movement of the attashe case as it is carried by an actor through the labyrinth of tunnels, platforms and escalators that make up the public areas of the station. Observed by 81 of the station’s security cameras, the journey begins and ends with the case being exchanged on opposite platforms.
The security cameras were connected to seven monitors, in turn connected to seven video recorders. By pre-mapping the journey then filming and editing it ‘live’, it was possible to create a continuous sequence. This runs from 14:08:30 to 14:31:10 the time coding and location description can be seen at the bottom of each screen. The sound was recorded simultaneously using a recorder concealed within the attache case.
Look out Michelangelo. Still, it shows you something of what the arties are brooding on these days.
And next time you complain about the government spying on you, be ready for them to say: “Oh but it’s art.”
Here (in the better a bit late than a bit never category) is vnunet.com reporting on Wednesday’s Queen’s Speech:
Plans to introduce identity cards have been included in the Queen’s Speech today, marking a significant testing ground for biometric security technology.
Details of the plans were kept to a minimum, with Her Majesty telling parliament that the government “will take forward work on an incremental approach to a national identity cards scheme and will publish a draft bill in the new year”.
It is likely that the cards will incorporate biometric technology. With potentially almost 50 million cards (for UK citizens aged 16 or above) being issued, this would be a major testing ground for the technology.
The technology is controversial, and the cabinet is not united:
Even Cabinet ministers have been sceptical about the plans. When talking about ID cards recently, Trade and Industry secretary Patricia Hewitt acknowledged that the government’s track record indicated that large IT projects had “a horrible habit of going wrong”.
And as civil libertarians predicted long ago, the Data Protection Act will only apply to the citizenry, not to the Government itself:
The legislation to be unveiled next year will also aim to iron out potential problems with existing laws, such as the Data Protection Act (DPA), to give the government greater flexibility on how it can use personal information.
Those pesky “existing laws”.
The DPA imposes conditions on how stored personal information can be used.
The government intends to combine information currently stored by the Passport Agency and the Driving and Vehicle Licensing Agency to form a national identity database. This procedure could face problems without the clarification.
Ah yes. Clarification.
The era of Joined Up Government approaches inexorably.
ASIO stands for Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, and the ASIO is in the news, here, and here:
An international law expert believes the Federal Government’s proposed changes to its ASIO laws to extend the questioning time allowed for non-English speakers would be a “clear contravention” of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
Associate Professor Donald Rothwell, from the University of Sydney, said amendments expected to be introduced today into Parliament, which would extend the period ASIO could question people who needed interpreters from 24 hours to 48 over a week, would breach Article 26 of the covenant.
… and here:
Labor is expected to agree to key legislative amendments that will provide stiff penalties for unauthorised disclosure of information relating to ASIO’s new special questioning and detention powers.
Attorney-General Philip Ruddock will introduce the amendments today, with an expectation they will be passed by both chambers before the parliament rises next week for Christmas.
The most contentious aspect of the legislation relates to the disclosure provisions by which the subject of an ASIO warrant or his lawyer or other persons convey information about the course of ASIO’s investigations.
To me it is not a new idea, but it is a good idea, the one that says that the rich splash out now for what they think of as luxuries, but that some of these luxuries are actually emerging necessities, which will in due course be available to all at a fraction of the first prices paid by the rich. Sandra Tsing Loh is reviewing a couple of books for The Atlantic on line on these kinds of themes:
To consider “luxury” always a bad thing, Twitchell argues, is simply to ignore history.
“Almost without fail, one generation’s indulgence becomes the next generation’s necessity. Think buttons, window glass, rugs, fermented juice, the color purple, door handles, lace, enamel, candles, pillows, mirrors, combs, umbrellas.”
Well said, Twitchell. Why, yesterday I even bought a comb myself. For 40p. It was a rather ugly brown colour. I would have preferred purple.
Nail clippers and shorts and socks were once a luxury, and don’t forget the least frivolous “indulgence” of all: indoor plumbing. In a way, the rich provide society with a valuable service, because they pay the “high first costs” of emerging technology. “Sure, the ‘upfronters’ get HDTV, digital cameras, laser eye surgery, Palm Pilots … They also get first crack at Edsels, the Betamax, eight-track stereo, and Corfam shoes.”
I’m not sure about Palm Pilots. Aren’t they becoming rather passé, unless you think of them as part of the ongoing attempt to perfect the portable phone? And what are Corfam shoes?
Also: into which box will history put blogging? Is blogging window glass or Betamax, nail clippers or … Corfam shoes?
Thanks to Arts & Letters Daily for the link. For me Arts & Letters Daily used to be a luxury, but it has become a necessity.
This is the subheading of Mark Steyn’s latest Spectator piece:
Mark Steyn lists the countries that must be dealt with if we are to win the war against terrorism
Okay. But the first regime listed gave me a bit of a turn:
New Hampshire
Does the axis of evil have a new member? Has the Governor of New Hampshire been stockpiling weapons of mass destruction? Is the whole article some kind of joke? Steyn is a funny man. Is this a funny piece?
Steyn goes on to list five further targets for regime change: Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and North Korea.
Profound changes in the above countries would not necessarily mean the end of the war on terror, but it would be pretty close. It would remove terrorism’s most brazen patron (Syria), its ideological inspiration (the prototype Islamic Republic of Iran), its principal paymaster (Saudi Arabia), a critical source of manpower (Sudan) and its most potentially dangerous weapons supplier (North Korea). They’re the fronts on which the battle has to be fought: it’s not just terror groups, it’s the state actors who provide them with infrastructure and extend their global reach. Right now, America – and Britain, Australia and Italy – are fighting defensively, reacting to this or that well-timed atrocity as it occurs. But the best way to judge whether we’re winning and how serious we are about winning is how fast the above regimes are gone. Blair speed won’t do.
That all sounds fairly serious, doesn’t it? So what does Steyn have against New Hampshire? Ah. Penny drops. New Hampshire is where he was writing from. The universe makes sense again.
Nevertheless, behind this little joke there is a serious point. Steyn is describing a war against terrorism that does make sense to me. But the opponents of this war say that by the time Uncle Sam has toppled the regimes of Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and North Korea – or by the time it has given up trying to – it will indeed end up governing New Hampshire, and everywhere else in the USA, somewhat differently. War is the health of the state, as somebody once said.
My answer would be that hardly anyone is suggesting that there be no vigorous war fought against Islamic terrorism – and hence that no measures be taken that might infringe the liberties of Americans, or others. The war is being fought and will go on being fought. The only serious argument is about where to fight it. Is it to be fought in places like Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, North Korea, and back home in places like New Hampshire? Or should some or all of the first five be struck off the list?
Either way, New Hampshire is indeed liable to end up a rather different place.
It scarcely counts as news:
Herbert Ndlovu, 43, who retired from the Zimbabwean National Army in August after 23 years service, said he had been ordered to put a cross against Mugabe’s names on ballot papers that should have been sent to soldiers.
Instead, the papers were resealed in envelopes and driven to Harare where they were used to support claims that Mugabe won the controversial presidential poll in March last year.
There were numerous secondhand accounts of vote rigging and gerrymandering, but the statement in Johannesburg by Ndlovu, who was tortured by the regime and has fled Zimbabwe fearing for his life, is the first personal account.
Accusations of electoral fraud were so convincing that the Commonwealth expelled Zimbabwe, and the United States and the European Union imposed travel and financial sanctions on Mugabe and his cronies.
Mr Ndlovu, said: “I filled in hundreds of ballot papers, maybe thousands. There were six of us working from early in the morning.”
The real shock would have been if this kind of thing had turned out not to have been happening. If Mr Ndlovu has said: “I know everyone assumes there was cheating, but there wasn’t. I know. I was directly involved. Everything was done correctly, with no shady business.” If he’d said that, and been believed, that would have been a story. But “yes there was cheating”?
Put it this way. I don’t know where this story was in the paper version of the Telegraph, but not on page one would be my guess.
I bought the paper version of the December 2003 issue of Prospect yesterday, and was all set to quote from the two pieces I’ve already been reading with particular interest, while apologising for not supplying any links. Well, I can, but in the case of the longer article only to an introductory excerpt. How long even these links will last, I cannot say.
From Michael Lind’s review of D. B. C. Pierre’s Vernon God Little, which won the Booker Prize.
At one point Pierre’s cartoon Texas sheriff says: “How many offices does a girl have that you can get more’n one finger into?” The comic malapropisms of pompous black characters were a staple of racist minstrel-show humour of the Amos ‘n’ Andy kind. If Pierre, purporting to unveil the reality of black America, had depicted a leering, sex-obsessed African-American police officer unable to distinguish the words “office” and “orifice,” would jury members like AC Grayling – a distinguished philosopher whose work I have long admired – have voted to award such bigoted trash the Booker prize?
But I don’t want to be too hard on the Booker jury. They’ve democratised literature by proving that a book doesn’t have to be any good to win a prize, so long as it exploits socially acceptable national and ethnic stereotypes. …
Assuming Lind is right about the crassness of this book, and although I’ve not read it I have no particular reason to doubt him, the next question is: why? What gives? Why this animus against Americans, and especially against those most American of Americans, the Texans. → Continue reading: Market-dominant minorities of the world unite!
Many weeks ago I wrote a posting here about how (a) England just might win the forthcoming Rugby World Cup, and that (b) this might work to the advantage of the Conservative Party. Well, England did win the Rugby World Cup, so how might this help the Conservatives?
I certainly didn’t have in mind that England’s front rooms will now be echoing with the claim that “now we’ll all vote Conservative then”. No. This is more the sort of thing I had in mind, from Adam Parsons in yesterday’s Scotland on Sunday.
It is easy in such times for the rest of us to fall prey to hyperbole, so let’s tread carefully here. But I think it is true to say this is an achievement of great importance, something that everybody can cherish. Not just because a British team has won the cup, nor that it is at last crossing from the bottom of the world and going to the top. It is something to do with the people who won it, and what they stand for.
England’s squad are a decent bunch of people. The likes of Josh Lewsey, Ben Cohen, Jason Leonard, Iain Balshaw – these are genuinely engaging characters, blokes you’d have a drink with.
In other words, they feel so very different from the image most footballers have come to represent over the past few years. On the one hand, we have people who have become the best in the world by training relentlessly, yet retain the level-headedness to acknowledge their supporters as their emotional crux; on the other, players who increasingly come to represent a streak of overpaid self-importance.
It is naive, I suppose, to hope that rugby could, even for a short time, replace football in the national affections, but I hope this victory will at least reverberate.
British soccer (as opposed to merely the English version) took two further knocks last week, when, in among all the England rugby fervour, both Wales (agonisingly) and Scotland (humiliatingly) failed to qualify for the European soccer championships next year.
This relative rise of rugby in the affections (England) and respect (elsewhere in Britain), and the relative decline in the esteem felt towards football, has, I feel, something of an end-of-era feel to it. It all adds to the sense of that New Labour/Princess Di/Things Can Only Get Better bubble bursting back into nothing whence it came. To put it rudely, that brief moment when the English told themselves (or were told by their newspaper columnists) that they preferred emotional incontinence to the old manly virtues of stoicism, calmness under stress, and grace and dignity whether one is victorious or defeated, to the uncontrolled emotional display of weeping copiously and in public when someone utterly unconnected with you dies, or running about like an escaped mental patient when you’ve scored a goal. → Continue reading: England’s Rugby World Cup win and the retreat from emotional incontinence
I don’t know why I yesterday took a random dip into Stephen R. Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, but I did, and I came across the following striking passage about the psychologist Victor Frankl. I think it was just coincidence that Frankl got a mention in one of the comments on this, although having chanced upon this passage, maybe that made me really notice it.
Anyway, here it is:
Frankl was a determinist raised in the tradition of Freudian psychology, which postulates that whatever happens to you as a child shapes your character and personality and basically governs your whole life. The limits and parameters of your life are set, and, basically, you can’t do much about it.
Frankl was also a psychiatrist and a Jew. He was imprisoned in the death camps of Nazi Germany, where he experienced things that were so repugnant to our sense of decency that we shudder to even repeat them.
His parents, his brother, and his wife died in the camps or were sent to the gas ovens. Except for his sister, his entire family perished. Frankl himself suffered torture and innumerable indignities, never knowing from one moment to the next if his path would lead to the ovens or if he would be among the “saved” who would remove the bodies or shovel out the ashes of those so fated.
One day, naked and alone in a small room, he began to become aware of what he later called “the last of the human freedoms” – the freedom his Nazi captors could not take away. They could control his entire environment, they could do what they wanted to his body, but Victor Frankl himself was a self-aware being who could look as an observer at his very involvement. His basic identity was intact. He could decide within himself how all of this was going to affect him. Between what happened to him, or the stimulus, and his response to it, was his freedom or power to choose that response.
In the midst of his experiences, Frankl would project himself into different circumstances, such as lecturing to his students after his release from the death camps. He would describe himself in the classroom, in his mind’s eye, and give his students the lessons he was learning during his very torture.
Through a series of such disciplines – mental, emotional, and moral, principally using memory and imagination – he exercised his small, embryonic freedom until it grew larger and larger, until he had more freedom than his Nazi captors. They had more liberty, more options to choose from in their environment; but he had more freedom, more internal power to exercise his options. He became an inspiration to those around him, even to some of the guards. He helped others find meaning in their suffering and dignity in their prison existence.
In the midst of the most degrading circumstances imaginable, Franki used the human endowment of self-awareness to discover a fundamental principle about the nature of man: Between stimulus and response, man has the freedom to choose.
My emboldenings are Covey’s italics.
I’m sure I don’t need to explain why I consider those paragraphs to be worthy of the attention of Samizdata readers.
But I have a question, relating to one particular matter raised by Covey, which is the very definite way he uses the words ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom’. ‘Liberty’ he uses to denote external circumstances, while ‘freedom’ is more like an inner mental experience. Liberty is political and perhaps also economic. Freedom is psychological, even existential. So, are these regular usages that I have been unaware of all these years? (I confess – for I’m not proud of this and have always meant to sort it out in my mind some day – that I have tended to use these two words interchangeably.) Or is Covey unusual in knowing when to say freedom and when liberty? Or are others equally definite about the different meanings of these words, but in different ways to Covey?
As often with me here, comments are not merely welcome; they are positively invited, not to say solicited.
Interesting legal issues are raised, I feel, by this story:
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Call it spam rage: A Silicon Valley computer programmer has been arrested for threatening to torture and kill employees of the company he blames for bombarding his computer with Web ads promising to enlarge his penis.
In one of the first prosecutions of its kind in the state that made “road rage” famous, Charles Booher, 44, was arrested on Thursday and released on bail for making repeated threats to staff of a Canadian company between May and July.
Booher threatened to send a “package full of Anthrax spores” to the company, to “disable” an employee with a bullet and torture him with a power drill and ice pick; and to hunt down and castrate the employees unless they removed him from their e-mail list, prosecutors said.
He used return e-mail addresses including Satan@hell.org.
In a telephone interview with Reuters on Friday, Booher acknowledged that he had behaved badly but said his computer had been rendered almost unusable for about two months by a barrage of pop-up advertising and e-mail.
Here’s what happened: I go to their Web site and start complaining to them, would you please, please, please stop bothering me,” he said. “It just sort of escalated … and I sort of lost my cool at that point.
I believe that Charles Booher speaks for many of us. In some ways, it strikes me, this resembles the Tony Martin case. The complaint against Martin was that he has shot one of his burglar-tormenters in the back. But since this burglar had attacked him repeatedly and since his latest attack provided yet further evidence that, if he could, he would be back, it made sense to me for Martin to shoot him in the back in self defence, against his next attack.
Booher requested, then demanded, that his computer to be left alone. But alas, Booher was unaware that his replies merely proved that he and his email were real, so the bombardments immediately intensified. But given that Booher was unlikely ever to catch these miscreants, was it not reasonable for him to threaten complete ghastliness in the unlikely event that he did? Had he known with certainty who they were, such bloodcurdling threats as Booher’s would have been excessive. More mundane remedies would have been sufficient. However, for people who behave as Booher’s tormentors behaved, is there not a case for the reintroduction of something like hanging, drawing and quartering? Or maybe crucifixion?
I agree, probably a bit over the top. But Booher’s rather extreme reaction does serve to remind us all of just what a problem spam is now becoming for many people, and that if the free market does not spread around some answers to the problems of people like Booher, governments will be only to ready to use his plight to impose their own much more draconian arrangements, in the form of alleged cures that will almost certainly turn out worse than the disease, but whose worseness will only become obvious when it is all in place and impossible then to reverse.
I for one would love to have a comment string explaining how ‘anti-spam,’ software works, what principles it follows, how it avoids stopping good stuff while still stopping the bad, and so on. Maybe Booher’s problem has already been solved, and the only problem that remains is telling him and everyone like him what this solution is.
From dc.internet.com:
U.S. Rep. Ed Markey (D.-MA) introduced legislation Thursday to allow cell phone customers to choose at no cost to not have their numbers listed in a national wireless directory. Although there is currently no such service, the wireless industry hopes to roll out directories next year similar to the landline 411 call assistance service.
The bill, known as the Wireless 411 Privacy Act, would require wireless carriers to have “clear pre-authorization” before listing an existing customer’s name and number in a directory. New customers would have to be given a “clear conspicuous mechanism” to decline to participate in any wireless directory assistance database.
The legisation further requires that no fee be charged for opting out of a national wireless directory.
Clearly this is White Rose Relevant, but taht last bit bothers me. “Choosing at no cost” sounds to me like loading costs onto other people.
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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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