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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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.
In order to get ‘into’ a sport, it usually helps to have grown up with it. I grew up with shooting, sailing and rugby in so far as those where the things I took to during my (mostly) English school days. Although I also served time doing part of my education in the USA, American Football, Baseball and Basketball never really appealed… not that I really have anything against those games, I just do not ‘relate’ to them myself. Strangely, the only times I have ever played soccer was in the USA as that seemed a more understandable sport to me, perhaps for the simple reason that although it was never a school sport in my neck of the woods in the UK, the ambient presence of ‘footie’ is hard to escape in England.
I do enjoy watching soccer and although the prospect of the World Cup did to some extent sweep me up, but the more matches I watched this time, the more this strange sinking feeling came over me. No doubt it is just me but there just seems to be something desperately unheroic about the game these days, at least at an international level. Perhaps the fact that every time I watched Italy, the eventual winners, play, they seemed to be taking more dives that Jacques Cousteau. I for one find athletes rolling around on the ground play-acting terrible injury when someone so much as brushes up against them such a pathetic and unmanly spectacle that perhaps the Italian team should replace their national flag by flying a petticoat from the nearest flagpole. Although Italy seem to be the worst offender in this regard, it does seem to be an increasingly widespread tactic (that said, anyone playing against Croatia need engage in no injury play-acting given that team’s ‘robust’ approach to the game).
Overall, I cannot help but feel that the whole thing was rather unedifying.
Yesterday… I saw a homemade butane-powered cannon shoot a saboted blueberry muffin across my lawn.
– Tamara K
A budget impasse caused by New Jersey state governor Jon Corzine attempting to increase taxes has caused many of the state’s functions to be shut down for the first time in New Jersey’s history.
This is of course splendid news and I hope the longer the shut down lasts, the more people in that bastion of statism that is New Jersey will realise that life goes on without the nanny state constantly interfering. More than half the state work force, 45,000 people, have been ordered to stay home. Perhaps people will eventually conclude this is actually rather a good thing and wonder why they have been paying for these people all these years. Moreover when it comes to things people really do seem to want, I would be willing to bet that most of the statistically challenged folks who entertain themselves in the now closed Atlantic City casinos would be just as happy to gamble without state regulators on the premises (who after all are there primarily to make sure the state gets their tax money).
Jon Corzine is showing the way: the world is not going to come to an end when large chunks of the state stop functioning. More and faster please.
It may sound like an odd thing to claim that a ‘saint’ has nothing to do with religion but in the case of St. George, that is quite a reasonable thing to say. Thus when the politically correct functionaries of the Church of England start floating the idea of replacing St. George with St. Alban as the patron saint of England, I would have to say that the Church of England are flattering themselves if they think it is actually up to them. Dating from the reign of Edward III, a certain conception of St. George has been part of English iconography considerably longer that there has been a Church of England and I suspect the association of this mythic dragon-slayer with ‘Englishness’ will outlive England’s established church comfortably.
In a post-Christian society like England, St. George, who may or may not have been a Roman general, is really just a cultural construct that embodies certain mythic values ascribed to England. And that is, of course, why the emasculated appeasers who make up the leadership of the Church of England really want to replace the mythic warrior St. George:
But the Church of England is considering rejecting England’s patron saint St. George on the grounds that his image is too warlike and may offend Muslims.
And given that Britain is fighting two wars at the moment in Iraq and Afghanistan, against an enemy who are Muslims, I can think of nothing better to commend St. George to a nation which may feel the need to summon the fortitude of warlike archetypes more than it needs an irrelevent and collapsing Church.
There is a fine article in the Telegraph rebutting anti-Americanism and another which features a splendid quote from an unnamed US embassy spokesman who responded to claims that a poll has found many British people are opposed to the US decision to overthrow Saddam Hussain and suggesting many had a low opinion of US civil society:
“We question the judgment of anyone who asserts the world would be a better place with Saddam still terrorizing his own nation and threatening people well beyond Iraq’s borders. With respect to the poll’s assertions about American society, we bear some of the blame for not successfully communicating America’s extraordinary dynamism. But frankly, so do you [the British press].”
Quite. Never apologise to your enemies.
A few days ago former Clinton Secretary of State Madelein Albright condemned the American Libraries Association (ALA) for its tepid response to the Cuban state’s repression of intellectual freedoms by its policies of banning certain books and imprisoning independent librarians who do not follow the party line.
However all I ever need to know about the ALA is revealed in this article with the line “But she won her loudest applause for oblique slaps at President Bush”. Hostility to Bush roused the emotions of more ALA librarians than defending oppressed librarians in Cuba. Of course that Americans are more concerned with American affairs is hardly surprising but when an organisation decries its government’s leadership at home on civil rights grounds and yet balks at heaping any significant opprobrium on an old style communist tyranny off the American coast, I think this is an organisation that can be safely consigned to the useful idiots category.
No doubt many in the ALA are impressed by the more than ten fold increase in the number of public libraries under Castro, ignoring the fact that these libraries can only stock books which are not deemed ideologically unacceptable by the regime. Somehow I rather doubt books by the oafish Michael Moore or Marx are in any shortage in the American libraries presided over by the ALA (and rightly so).
I just discovered that O.G. blogger Acidman passed away last Monday, which is really too bad as he was a splendidly cantankerous and hugely entertaining SOB. I always thought of him as the Ted Nugent of the blogosphere.
If my blog does not meet your standards, then LOWER YOUR STANDARDS. Who the hell do you think you are, anyway?
Rock on, Rob.
Want to see Tony Blair getting a political kick in the cobblers?
Sweet. Agree or disagree, it is nice to see some political hardball. UKIP thrive on such confrontations. It is hard to imagine the pointless milksops of the ‘Conservative’ Party getting stuck in like that.
Logic has made me hated by the world
– Abelard of Le Pallet
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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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