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]

Samizdata quote of the day

The only thing I believe in print these days is the date.

– Sienna Miller

Samizdata quote of the day

All I ask is the chance to prove that money can’t make me happy

– Spike Milligan

Samizdata quote of the day

There has been a change in the policy on policies, and therefore all the policies have had to be rewritten in order to be in compliance with the new policies policy

– A compliance officer at a large investment bank, during a compulsory compliance training seminar this week.

Remember, remember…

As we like to remind you every 5th of November, Guy Fawkes was the only man to ever enter Parliament with honest intentions…

samizdata_over_parliament_noborder.jpg

A little something for Halloween

First turn up volume as soundtrack is quite soft…

Samizdata quote of the day

I hate the use of the word ‘public’ as a synonym for ‘government’. The government is the government and the public is what is not the government.
But I am not here to save the English language, I am here to save the planet.

Leon Louw, at today’s Libertarian Alliance/Libertarian International conference in London

Samizdata quote of the day

Try and put me in a burqua and you die.

Ysabel Howard

Samizdata quote of the day

David Attenborough is forever finding unusual creatures in the deepest parts of the ocean. He tells us how they can see down there in the murky depths and how they mate. He tells us where they live, how they raise their young and how they use their tentacles to find prey. But he never tells us the most important thing: what they taste like.

– Jeremy Clarkson, the newspaper columnist and lead presenter of Top Gear, the BBC motoring programme. For people who do not know who David Attenborough is, he is the famous maker of very serious but also wonderfully filmed television documentaries about nature.

Samizdata quote of the day

“We all have to compromise,” says Walt Chalmers (played by Robert Vaughn)

“Bullshit,” replies Frank Bullitt, (Steve McQueen).

From Bullitt.

Samizdata quote of the day

I don’t care whether Monbiot read Sanskrit or the back of Frosties packets he is still a 24 carat felching tube jammed in the clacker of society.

– Commenter Nick M

A mixed look at guns and self-defence

Kim du Toit, a regular commenter on these parts with a blog of his own, links to this story about a self-defence shooting in Dallas, Texas. Just scroll down and read the comments from the cop at the end. Absolutely superb.

The left-leaning Observer newspaper (UK), meanwhile, carries a hostile piece about gun ownership in the US and the amount of gun crime there. The problem is that the article does not really take into account the rather glaring fact that in Britain, a country with the fiercest gun laws this side of Alpha Centauri, there has been a lot of gun crime in our cities lately.

Here is an except:

An average of almost eight people aged under 19 are shot dead in America every day. In 2005 there were more than 14,000 gun murders in the US – with 400 of the victims children. There are 16,000 suicides by firearm and 650 fatal accidents in an average year. Since the killing of John F Kennedy in 1963, more Americans have died by American gunfire than perished on foreign battlefields in the whole of the 20th century.

The problem with all these sort of statistics, I reckon, is that they need to be put into context. Cultures matter: in parts of Europe, such as Switzerland, gun ownership among the adult population is widespread, but gun crime is low, and that fact cannot just be attributed to all that healthy Alpine air. In the US, gun crime is closely linked to drug gangs, and I gently venture to suggest that the War on Drugs, which is a disastrous policy, is the culprit. The statistics given by the Observer – it provides no source – do not tell us whether gun crime is rising or falling, or is stable, or what other categories of crime are like. Nor does it adjust for population levels to compare with other countries where gun ownership might be quite high. It may of course be that some crime, such as acts of domestic violence, would drop if gun ownership was outlawed, but what would happen to things like domestic burglary, for example? I certainly would not want to burgle anyone’s home in Texas for the fairly obvious reason that I would end up very dead.

The supremacy of science (er… well, some of it anyway)

Hey you! Yes you there, slouching over your computer, clad only in your pyjamas while you wait for the next remittance from your greedy, unscrupulous, oil-baron paymasters. Who the hell gave you the right to question global warming, you maggot? Don’t you know that it’s SCIENCE??!! Yes, science! What part of the word ‘science’ don’t you understand? Scientists KNOW things. That’s why they are called ‘scientists’. And who are you, pray tell? Why, you are nothing more than a bunch of demented, anti-human global-warming DENIERS. Yes, that’s right, you’re just a rabble of depraved neo-nazis who can only drag your knuckles off the floor for long enough to count your Exxon paycheques.

So go back to doing whatever it is you heartless, moronic goons do with your spare time and just leave the scientists to the important business of making the world a better place.

Got that? Good. Excellent. Carry on.

One of the world’s most respected scientists is embroiled in an extraordinary row after claiming that black people are less intelligent than white people.

James Watson, a Nobel Prize winner for his part in discovering the structure of DNA, has provoked outrage with his comments, made ahead of his arrival in Britain today…

The 79-year-old geneticist said he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really.”. He said he hoped that everyone was equal, but countered that “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true”.

Is somebody paying him to say that?