I cannot understand how a sensible coherent guy like Steve Baker managed to get into Parliament as a Tory MP…
Just watch this and then lament that a clueless jackanapes like David Cameron is running the Conservative Party and not this guy.
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January 6th, 2013 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
 … a prosperous and subversive new year.
Expect some new voices and views here soon. And some confusion over names…
January 1st, 2013 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
Steve Redgrave writes in the Telegraph (which may be inaccessible to overseas readers unless you delete the Telegraph cookie):
Really? Who is this ‘we’ I wonder? I perceived Britain as a regulatory statist nation circling the drain with a smug grin on its collective and in-need-of-a-punch-in-its-Steven Fry face before the Olympics… and the preposterous and expensive spectacle has just reinforced that view. Indeed the much trumpeted ‘success’ of the games just tries to stuff the economic damage they caused down the memory hole. But hey, in the final self congratulatory event, the establishment got to praise that ‘envy of the world’ that so few other nations seem to envy enough to emulate, the NHS, so no… the Olympics just reinforced my less than flattering view of Britain rather than ‘completely overhauling’ it. December 28th, 2012 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
Here it is! We will be tweaking for quite some time I suspect for both function and aesthetics, but we now have a content management system that does not involve stone tablets at any stage of the process. Now I just need to figure out how to use it… December 14th, 2012 | 93 comments - (Comments are closed)
As of this Thursday, Samizdata will temporarily stop updating and on Friday, it will go off-line completely for… a while. We wil be back at some point over the weekend with the New Improved Version. December 11th, 2012 | 41 comments - (Comments are closed)
Roosevelt’s claim that we can judge the social conscience of the government by how it collects taxes is true in a way he could not have imagined. Contrary to FDR and Justice Holmes, taxes are neither a price (in the voluntary-transaction sense) nor club dues. On the contrary, they are exactions by threat of violence. Some social conscience! How ironic that organized society and civilization itself are said to depend on the government’s threatening peaceful people if they fail to surrender their property as demanded by politicians who presumptuously and self-servingly claim to “represent” all the people. Far from some enlightened institution, taxation began when conquerors realized that formal and continuing appropriation of a subject population’s wealth was preferable to hit-and-run pillaging. For this to work, however, the rulers needed to convince the peasants that the regime would protect them from predators in return for their regular remittances. That’s right: It was a protection racket, from which the racketeers and their cronies profited handsomely. December 11th, 2012 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
It’s the NHS first got me thinking how the power of the narrative distorts so much of how organisations & ideas are viewed. This one starts; “Staffed by dedicated doctors & caring nurses the British National Health Service is the envy of the world…” It runs for a couple of paragraphs, was first written the day before its inception & has been repeated so many times it’s probably encoded somewhere down in our DNA by now. It’s not just that the public believe it. Almost everyone connected to the NHS do as well. Doctors, nurses, administrators, politicians. Even most of the media. It makes it impossible for any of them to view it with a clear eye. The incidents quoted above… others much worse we’ve heard about in the last few years… they should be part of the narrative as well but it just rewrites itself over them. Edits them away so the next time comes as exactly the same shock as the one before & the one before that. No-one actually learns any lessons or does anything because the narrative reassures them it’s not necessary. They’re just aberrations. Momentary & inexplicable blips in an otherwise perfect system. Or just signs that even more money needs tipping into it. That the engine that’s coughing & banging & spewing out smoke & broken parts would be running as sweet as a sewing machine with just a little more fuel. – Commenter ‘Bloke in Spain’ December 6th, 2012 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Spectator have made it clear that regardless of what state regulation parliament imposes upon the press…
To say this is ‘admirable’ would be to damn it with faint praise. It is magnificent. November 28th, 2012 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
There are two phrases that we rarely hear these days: “it’s a free country” and “there ought to be a law against it”. We do not hear these any more for the simple reason that we are no longer a free country, and more often than not there is a law about it. (link is to the Daily Telegraph so some overseas readers may issues accessing it) November 27th, 2012 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
Blaming the prince of the fools should not blind anyone to the vast confederacy of fools that made him their prince. – via Bernard Goldberg November 16th, 2012 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
So the cure for the looming ‘fiscal cliff’ will be – surprise! massive income tax increases (expiration of the “Bush tax cuts”) plus significant additional income taxes) and no cuts in spending what-so-ever. Oh, sure, they’ll eliminate the mohair price support program, and close a post office or two – reducing spending by 0.00000126% – and this will be presented as brutal, inhumane cuts to the very fabric of our society. But the Federal juggernaut will continue unabated. – Commenter llamas (oopse, sorry) November 9th, 2012 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
Samizdata will no longer be embedding links to the Daily Telegraph’s site as they have created a pay-wall for overseas readers after they have accessed twenty articles in a month. As a significant proportion of Samizdata’s readership is overseas, and as there are many alternative sources of news on-line, we bid adieu to the Telegraph, effective immediately. November 8th, 2012 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
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