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.
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The Russian airforce has recently resumed long range patrols, approaching the airspace of Britain and Diego Garcia… and I am pleased to say the correct response has come from the US State Department:
“If Russia feels as though they want to take some of these old aircraft out of mothballs and get them flying again that’s their decision,” Sean McCormack, a State Department spokesman, said. “That is a decision for them to take – it’s interesting. We certainly are not in the kind of posture we were with what used to be the Soviet Union. It’s a different era.”
Amen. This is the comment I left on the Telegraph article:
Who cares? All this talk about the resurgence of Russian power is tosh. Just look at the numbers. Even with all their gas and oil, Russia has the same GDP as Italy (and Italy is not an economic monoculture based on what comes out of the ground). Compared to China, the EU and the USA, Russia is, strategically speaking, in the minor league. If the quasi-fascists who run Russia these days want to rattle their little sabre, strut around like Mussolini and pretend they matter, let them. The appropriate response to their antics? No response at all.
I think the murderous actions of the Russian secret service in London are far more worthy of harsh responses than the antics of their military. I suspect a reaction to these military flights consisting of broad indifference and maybe the odd embarrassed snicker is far more likely to enrage the Kremlin than shaking a sabre back at them. The Devil does not like to be mocked.
There is a strange furore brewing over pharmaceuticals giant Johnson & Johnson suing the American Red Cross over their use of… the Red Cross… on certain commercial products.
My first reaction was “What the…? Have J&J gone completely nuts?”
But then I actually read the background to the story from someone who works at J&J, and also got some background from someone I know who works with them, whereupon I realised actually it is the American Red Cross who have gone nuts. In fact they are worse than nuts, they are acting both unreasonably and quite dishonourably.
Clearly J&J must be aghast by the PR mess that taking legal action against a venerable institution like the Red Cross is going to stir up… and the Red Cross knows that. And so it is very clear to me that when you read the Red Cross press release, what is going on here is a cynical bit of capitalist bashing so that the Red Cross can use their sainted reputation to tear up an agreement they reached over the appropriate use of that Red Cross symbol in… 1895.
Now you might think that how can J&J claim to own the rights to the Red Cross symbol in the USA? Sure, that seems weird, but the fact is the American Red Cross did agree that J&J did indeed own it all the way back in 1895, so that is an indisputable fact, and in return for J&J’s forbearance for the Red Cross using that symbol (not to mention a century of monetary and product donations… but then as we all know, no good deed goes unpunished), the Red Cross undertook not to use the symbol as a logo on products in the USA that directly compete with J&J products that also use that symbol. And so it was for one hundred years.
Until one day the Red Cross decide it no longer suits them, no doubt on the advise of some overpaid shister. It is a shameful think that an institution that people take to represent charity and honour can quite literally trade on that perception in order to act dishonourably. Sometimes big companies act appallingly, but sometimes they are just big targets for other who act dishonourably. J&J have no choice but to defend their trademark but the only winner in all of this will be a bunch of crapulous American lawyers. Such stupidity.
Update: some more background here.
Lately it seems that hardly a week goes by that we do not get some new chilling preview of the Police State that many in the political class are trying to bring about . How about this one?
Tens of thousands of people who have failed to pay court fines amounting to more than £487m would be banned from leaving the country under new powers outlined by the Home Office. Ministers are also looking at ways of using the new £1.2bn “e-borders” programme to collect more than £9m owed in health treatment charges by foreign nationals who have left the country without paying.
The programme, to be phased in from October next year, will also allow the creation of a centralised “no-fly” list of air-rage or disruptive passengers which can be circulated to airlines. The e-borders programme requires airlines and ferry companies to submit up to 50 items of data on each passenger between 24 and 48 hours before departure to and from the UK. With 200 million passenger movements in and out of the UK last year to and from 266 overseas airports on 169 airlines, an enormous amount of data is expected to be generated by the programme.
Of course as the government freely admits, it will use this to monitor everyone’s movements for all manner of purposes beyond “air-rage” or people using the NHS. I can only imagine how quickly the list of thing that will get you stopped at the border is going to grow. Sorry, you have an appointment with a ‘social’ worker next week and we need to make sure you turn up. Failed to put your recycling out? BBC tax not paid yet? Outstanding parking tickets? Your carbon ration has been used up? Your kiddies refusing to attend the local educational conscription centre?
You think I am joking?
Putin’s Russia continues its heroic great march backwards in time. The ‘weaponization of psychiatry‘ is something that never went out of style in China, where people can be described as ‘politically deranged’. The use of psychiatric detention against political enemies has a long history in the not-so-post Communist world and so I can hardly say I am surprised to see this being done again in Russia.
Earlier this evening I was reading the on-line Telegraph and clicked on a link about a Taliban leader being killed in a NATO air strike in what I assumed was going to be Afghanistan… and to my surprise I ended up at an article about the interminable queues at British airports! So this NATO air strike against the Taliban was where exactly?
I looked again a bit later and the links were appropriately sorted out but as someone who has just passed through the nightmare that is Heathrow, for one glorious moment I thought some public spirited member of the armed forces stuck in one of what Adriana calls “the security theatre queues” had snapped and called in a long over due air strike on Terminal 2.
To someone like me who is desperate to see the regulatory centrist ‘Conservative’ party lose the next election to the regulatory centrist ‘Labour’ party, is always agreeable to see the Tories turn on their own. Even those benighted party loyalists who think that it does not matter what policies one advocates just as long as you win, it is finally starting to dawn on them that Dave is not even going to do that.
So I must say I had a few chuckles at Simon Heffer’s delightfully bitchy sneer at Dave Cameron’s crass duplicity (everyone expects a politician to be duplicitous but crassness is unforgivable).
In his Today interview, Dave chose to insult a range of people, from former Tory treasurer Lord Kalms to ex-Europe spokesman Graham Brady, for daring to disagree with him. Such people don’t attack his policies, but rather his lack of them. It is little wonder, therefore, in the aftermath of this astonishingly infantile behaviour, that we should now choose to examine Dave’s personality. He has shown himself to have exceptionally poor judgement, to be entirely untrustworthy and to be, in short, a rather nasty piece of work: which, as regular readers will know, is what I have always thought he is.
More and faster please.
The impulse to control everything pervades those who make up the governmental class. That is, after all, why someone decides to spend their working life in politics and applying the collective means of coercion to others. The extent to which this desire to impose force backed control can be realised is exactly what defines whether or not you are ‘free’ or a ‘slave’ of the state.
So when yesterday I read that the state plans to take DNA samples that will be retained forever, from people accused of speeding or littering or failing to wear a seatbelt, I realised that if this happens, we will have finally reached the point where the only response left to being stopped for even the most minor offence, is to run and if need be to use violence to escape, and to make no apology for that if you are caught. The offences are trivial but the prospect of being DNA sampled upon being accused of a trivial offence, and that being kept on record forever, is something worth getting violent about. Being fingerprinted is bad enough but this is intolerable.
The only thing that will stop this appalling state of affairs from coming to pass is if enough people react with outrage to this proposal.
The sooner my affairs contrive to let me get out of this godforsaken country the better.
James Porter, the headmaster of a private school, has been convicted over the death of a three year old child who fell from some playground steps and died. The implications of this monstrous and truly idiotic ruling are that soon visits to the playground will become a thing of the past unless the students are wearing safety helmets and body armour and are supervised by a team of lawyers at all times.
It is a tragedy that a young child died after jumping down a few stairs but that is just the way life is… sometimes it ends in premature death for no good reason other that children are wont to act like children. That is sad but it is also not just no one’s fault, it is entirely acceptable as life has its casualties and to blame this teacher is truly, truly monstrous.
Of course it cannot have helped that James Porter made the supremely sensible but very politically politically incorrect statement that “[Children] need to learn how to move in any given situation in a way that will protect them from injury. If they don’t have that facility, if we simply wrap them in cotton wool, they will never learn that lesson.”
But never mind that everyone seems to agree that there was nothing unusually unsafe or in any way exceptional about this particular flight of steps, this man has been found guilty under some preposterous health and safety regulations regardless. We seem to be heading down the enervating and idiotic path blazed by the United States in which every mishaps has to be someone else’s fault regardless of common sense or natural justice. Appalling.
Now I am always quick to say nasty things about the British state and the state’s educational system in particular, but this article is really strange (as in ‘has little relation to reality’ type strange).
So waiting for the Dolphin swim at Discovery Cove in Orlando, my daughter Nikki and I were seated with a Brit family – mom, daughter and son. After small talk about the great value of the pound vs the dollar etc, I mentioned that Churchill was one of my heroes. The son, no more than 16 countered that he really liked Hitler, and his sister Gandhi. I was stunned and sickened. […] In speaking privately with his mother after my discussion, she stated that this is the new curriculum in the British schools to combat “prejudice” against Germans. They teach the children not to “judge” Hitler.
Sorry but much as I might slag off the state and all it’s works, this is preposterous. In fact of all the screwed up things I have heard about the goings on in British schools, I have never heard of anything even close to this. I suppose it shows the dangers of deriving your views of the situation in some other country on a casual conversation with a single group of strangers.
The plans by the state to extend the period of educational conscription in Britain could well be the issue that helps radicalise future generations in a most useful way, at least if you see the world the way I do.
“Here is a Government that has toyed with the idea of lowering the voting age to 16 in order to promote a greater sense of citizenship amongst our young people. Yet it proposes to extend compulsory education or training to 18, to compel the already disaffected to, in their perception, prolong the agony.”
She said that making teenagers “conscripts” was likely to “reinforce failure, leading to even greater disaffection. Enforcement could lead to mass truancy, further disruption to other learners and staff, maybe even needless criminalisation if ‘enforcement measures’ are imposed,
I am also delighted to see someone in the mainstream media making the self-evident point that state education is indeed conscription. The absurdity of trying to teach children who are determined to not be taught is evident at sinkhole schools across the country so why the state thinks digging the same hole deeper is going to solve anything is not obvious to me. Still, never interrupt the enemy when he is making a mistake as there is a clear upside to all this. What the government intends to do will engender disaffection and hostility to the impositions of the state at an early age, and without doubt mischievous political activists will fan the flames by pointing out to the internet savvy blog reading schoolyard conscripts of the future that they are not wrong to feel angry and they are not wrong to refuse to cooperate. Excellent.
I am delighted that contrary to my early expectations they they would do nothing at all other than make an official grimace and then politely forget about the whole affair, the UK government’s action in expelling Russian diplomats is both all but openly stating the Russian government was behind the Litvinenko assassination and actually trying to impose some political cost on Putin’s regime. It is only a small step but psychologically it is a very important one.
As Blair was showing signs of going soft on this horrendous issue,this is a welcome indication that the Brown government is really not going to let Putin’s regime murder people in Britain in an ostentatiously obvious manner and let it pass with a shrug.
I was pleased that Downing Street is actively discouraging British companies from investing in Russia in the aftermath of the Shell Oil Sakhalin Island appropriations but more pressure over the Litvineko affair is now needed, if only to discourage more of the same. Of course I expect the Russian government to over-react at all but being called murderers and thereby help the process of de-normalising relations with that far from normal state. There is truly no upside to allowing Putin and his cronies to imagine they can do what they want in Britain without consequences.
Yes, I know what the actual charges filed against Black were, but there is an interesting article in the Guardian by former Telegraph editorial director Kim Fletcher called The wages of envy which raises some interesting points.
It is in the nature of court cases that findings of guilt lend an artificial certainty to the world. Black will now find himself spoken of as another Robert Maxwell. But while Black’s detractors were quickly out of the traps to say “we told you so”, it became clear during the trial that nothing going on at Hollinger was in the same league as the Mirror under Maxwell. Before his trial the result had been seen even by Black’s circle as a foregone conclusion. “There’s no way a blue collar jury in Chicago can let a man who looks like Conrad off every charge,” said one of his friends to me, before the trial began
Given that the central charges failed, it does make me wonder if he was not in truth convicted of being unapologetic about being rich and being called Lord Black. Perhaps the verdict had as much to do with the jury selection process and where the prosecution chose to hold the trial than whatever Lord Black actually did or did not do.
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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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