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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David Miliband, Britain’s Environment Secretary, gave a glimpse of what a future of total state regulation might look like by laying out the idea of individual ‘carbon rationing’ . It would allow the state to keep track of all your ‘carbon related’ economic activity and thereby regulate, well, damn near everything by deciding how many ‘points’ your activities will deduct from your ration. By introducing rationing in effect green extremists are floating the idea of putting the entire nation on what amounts to a de facto war footing in which the state controls ‘fair’ use of scare resources, taxing people with more money for their ‘unfair’ carbon use.
Make no mistake, this is not about environmentalist voodoo science, it is about controlling people and this is the tool they are going to use.
For information on the public meeting on Regulation of Investigative Powers Act consultations, check out Blogzilla.
The MV-22 Osprey programme has survived so many fatal crashes and attempts to kill it in congress that perhaps it should be renamed the MV-22 ‘Rasputin’. Yet still it continues, though I see that one of the two MV-22s flown from the US to Farnborough a couple days ago had to divert to Iceland because of engine difficulties.
Yet every time I look at the amazing disc loading on those things, I wonder how the hell they intend to use them? Given that when hovering the downwash has been known to knock people off their feet and send fast moving debris flying in all directions, how is this kite going to replace the CH-46E and CH-53D? An aircraft designed for unprepared LZ special operations that has to hover high to avoid downwash related problems and which cannot auto-rotate if damaged fills me with grave foreboding. Although the range and speed are very impressive, I wonder if this aircraft will not just be too hot and too inflexible for practical operations at the current state of technology.
There is a very interesting editorial in the Arab Times that takes the view that Hezbollah is a blight on Lebanon. Moreover the writer, Arab Times chief editor Ahmed Al-Jarallah, clearly dislikes the fact that it is the Lebanese people, not Syria and Iran, who are paying the price for Hezbollah’s lethal antics. He is none too flattering about the Lebanese government either.
[Hezbollah leader] Nasrallah has dragged Lebanon and its people into misfortune. In spite of the destruction caused by Israel, Lebanese politicians don’t want to be frank with their people and tell them that they should not support Nasrallah’s decision to declare war on Israel. Nasrallah has hijacked the authority of the Lebanese government to have control over the people of Lebanon while Lebanese politicians continue to remain mute spectators without voicing their true feelings.
Read the whole thing for a very clear Arab opinion of where the blame should lie for the ongoing horror… and it is not Israel.
Lebanese Political Journal makes for grim reading. It is all well and good to wish for the destruction of Hezbollah (as indeed I do) but that does not reduce the sadness I feel when I read personal accounts of the cost to ordinary Lebanese people.
If only there was some other way but I cannot see what that would be. My fear is that the aftermath of this will kill off the modern secular state Lebanon is struggling to become.
The anger of the Lebanese people under the bombs who do not support Hezbollah is understandable but that does not change the fact Hezbollah exists as a state-with-a-state and that it attacks Israel and is dedicated to its destruction. Until there is a Lebanese solution to the ‘problem’ of Hezbollah, Israeli interventions are inevitable. Unfortunately I am unsure Israel has exercised sufficient discrimination to keep this as a war between Israel and Hezbollah rather than Israel and everyone in Lebanon.
People in Lebanon have ample reason to distrust Israeli good will or promises but then Israel knows all too well what Hezbollah has in mind for it and until the Islamo-fascists and their sponsors are taken out of the equasion it is hard to see how anything will improve.
The Hezbollah missiles landing on civilians deep within Israel change everything. I would suspect that the Syrians and Iranians who have supplied Hezbollah with the weapons to effectively attack Israel’s cities will soon find Israel’s fury directed against them directly. If we start seeing chemical or even radiological warheads, which are by no means beyond possibility, the Israeli reaction scarecely bears thinking about.
Will the US and UK get dragged in? Well given that Syria and Iran are both also integral to the insurgency against the US and UK in Iraq, it may well be in the interests of the allies to strip away the fiction that these nations are not a key enabler of their woes in Iraq. A wider Middle Eastern war would open all manner of options against the manufacturers and suppliers of the weapons killing US and UK forces. The upside/downside could be considerable. Roll the dice.
Pondering putting your spare cash onto petroleum futures? You had better do it quick.
So we now know that the police officers who shot dead Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes, claiming they thought he was a suicide bomber, will face no charges. Instead, Scotland Yard may face charges under, wait for it, health and safety regulations.
Yet all this utterly misses the point. I am willing to believe that the event itself was all just a horrible cock-up but what I am not willing to accept is that after shooting dead the wrong man, the authorities can issue a stream of bare faced lies with complete impunity. Very soon after the event it must have been clear to the police they had made a horrible blunder and this fact soon came out. However we were then told that the unfortunate Brazilian had significantly contributed to his own fate… he was wearing an unseasonable padded jacket1, he had run when challenged by the armed police and been chased in the tube station2 and finally had vaulted over the gate and run on to the train pursued by the cops3… all of which we now know was completely false.
The reasons for such lies are clear. I was horrified when I first heard they had got the wrong man but given what we were told about how it had all gone down, I was not unsympathetic to the police. After all, in the aftermath of the suicide attacks on London a few weeks earlier and failed attacks a few days before, anyone who runs from armed police when challenged only to dive onto a crowded train can only expect one thing. But then the truth came out as there were simply too many witnesses and too many inconsistencies. Yet even that did not stop the London Transport CCTV footage that we are told makes us ‘secure beneath the watchful eyes’ from being mysteriously blank.
So where did those lies come from? Who told the police spokesman to offer up those fabricated events and why are they not on trial for conspiracy to pervert the course of justice?
And yet it seems the entire stream of disinformation that the authorities tried to use to mitigate this ghastly error has just vanished down the memory hole. Why are Britain’s self-important press silent on this? THAT is what I want to know.
1 = He was in fact wearing a short jeans jacket
2 = He rode to the station on a bus without being challenged
3 = He calmly used his season ticket to pass though the automated gate
I take a more equivocal view of the current military actions in Lebanon than Dale. I strongly question the wisdom of dislocating communications and infrastructure in the non-Hezbollah controlled parts of the country, i.e. punishing people who are, if not natural allies of Israel (though some are), at least not currently Israel’s enemies.
And yet…
We cannot pretend that Lebanon is a normal nation-state. The Lebanese government does not in reality control Lebanon, or more correctly, it controls Lebanon’s various regions at the sufferance of the local factional leaders. Clearly just as the Lebanese government is not responsible for the actions of Hezbollah within Lebanon, they cannot then claim their sovereignty has been violated when Israel attacks Hezbollah within Lebanon: they cannot have it both ways. If they are responsible, then the Lebanese state must stop Hezbollah. As they clearly cannot do that, they cannot reasonably object to Israel doing so. But similarly Israel should be very discriminating upon whom they drop their munitions.
I cannot really complain about Israel hammering Hezbollah anywhere they can be found (and I do mean anywhere). Hezbollah must be destroyed in the most literal sense of the word. Moreover the people in Syria and Iran who make Hezbollah possible must also be destroyed, again quite literally… and political posturing, UN resolutions and negotiations will not achieve those objectives. To this end right now Israel should be striking targets in Iran and Syria in retaliation for Hezbollah activities. In short, whilst I am very unhappy to see Israel attacking the airport in Beirut, I would have little problem with them doing exactly that to Tehran or Damascus. I think they are ‘sharing the pain’ with the wrong people.
It is easy to point the finger at Israel (I am certainly not reflexively pro-Israeli myself and Lord knows they can be pretty arrogant and unsympathetic), but in truth I have yet to hear any workable alternatives to what they are doing being offered up by the critics. Hezbollah’s actions are intolerable and so why should Israel tolerate them? If not this then what should Israel do? Methinks this is not an easy question to answer.
I was just watching a BBC Two special on the TV on political youth movements in Putin’s increasingly repressive Russia. During the programme a member of Yabloko was interviewed, the voice-over describing it as a ‘liberal’ (in the British sense of the word) opposition group, which according to its stated platform it sort of is (at least by local standards).
And on the wall behind the Yabloko spokesman being interview was a large picture of… Che Guevara.
So let me get this straight, some of their activists have a fondness for a mass murdering communist whose ‘philosophy of the wall’ was to simply execute ‘class enemies’, but they are ‘liberal’? Really? How liberal exactly? It reminded me of the commentary during the attempted military coup d’etat against Boris Yeltsin in August 1991 in which a CNN reporter described the orthodox communists in the military attempting to roll back the collapse of the Soviet Empire as ‘right wing’. Well what constitutes ‘left wing’ if being a communist does not? I would say that CNN reporter was just using the term to mean ‘the bad guys’.
Thank goodness we have the Republicans to protect people from themselves and limit international on-line commerce.
The U.S. House of Representatives voted on Tuesday to restrict Internet gambling, a move Republicans hope will boost their popularity before the November election. By a vote of 317 to 93, politicians approved a controversial bill that tries to eliminate many forms of online gambling by targeting Internet service providers and financial intermediaries, namely banks and credit card companies that process payments to offshore Web sites.
Net gambling “is a scourge on our society,” said Rep. Bob Goodlatte, a Virginia Republican who’s tried for the better part of a decade to enact legislation that combats Net gambling.
‘Our’ society? Bob Goodlatte should really get out of the coercion business and follow his natural career as a barista and leave the series of social interactions we call ‘society’ to its members, rather than using force to distort it.
Now can someone remind me why the Elephants are supposed to be trusted with imperfect edifice of American capitalism and civil liberty but the wicked ol’ Donkeys cannot? A pox of both parties I say but at least the Democrats were on the right side of this issue.
My prediction: People who want to gamble on-line will start registering with trusted on-line off-shore providers, who will change a forwarder URL of their sites every few days and notify their clients of the new URL via or-mail or SMS in order to get around ISP blocking for those unable to use proxies and other ways to confuse the ISP where you are really going. Payment will be between the client and a series of disposable off-the-shelf companies in Panama or Grand Cayman which shut down, only to be replaced by a new company, as soon as the US credit card companies identify them as receiving money from gambling.
The US state can make it harder but if people want to wager their own money, they will always find a way. If i was a betting man (i.e. statistically challenged, which I am not), I would put my money on the Feds getting their arses kicked when they try to shut the off-shore sites down (particularly as they are legal in the countries they operate in and can take clients from the rest of the world without much difficulty).
Can anyone say “Drug War”?
It seems there is a shortage of certain drugs in Britain’s National Health Service.
Joe Fortescue from Alfreton, Derbyshire wants the government to provide more diamorphine, which has been in short supply since 2004. He said his 49-year-old ex-wife from Nottingham was screaming in pain in the days before her death because it was not available.
Horrendous. We are not talking about sophisticated and costly cutting edge drugs here, just a strong painkiller. As someone personally currently gobbling none-too-effective codeine painkillers every four hours after a close encounter with the NHS yesterday, dare I say I ‘feel the pain’ of those relying on the NHS in their time of need.
Perhaps the ex-husband of the hapless woman who died in agony for want of the correct drugs should have just scored some himself, available to anyone driving slowly with their windows open in the crappier parts of most large British towns and cities. Diamorphine is essentially just heroin after all and needless to say the ‘free market’ in heroin has no difficulty supplying public demand. Only the state could be inept enough to be unable to find heroin for a dying woman.
Truly the state is not your friend.
It now looks like the death toll in the sickening atrocity in Bombay will probably top two hundred innocent civilians, with hundred more injured, many of them horribly maimed. But then as any Indian could have told you years ago, evil horrors like this perpetrated by Islamist psychopaths do not just happen in New York, London and Tel Aviv.
So tell me, how long before the good folks at Democratic Underground find some way to blame BushMacHitler for this? This is a truly ghastly attack and we all know that America-centric buffoons infected with Bush Derangement Syndrome cannot even conceive of something bad happening which does not somehow involve the United States.
I invite the commentariat to find the articles somehow blaming the US administration for this. You know it is going to happen.
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