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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The IMF auditors have arrived in Dublin. What should Ireland do now?
According to Allison Bray writing in the Irish Independent the smoking rate in Ireland has soared despite the Irish smoking ban.
Despite hikes in tobacco tax, the smoking ban and a new law against the public display of cigarettes for sale, the number of smokers has steadily risen since 2007 when 29pc of the population smoked.
The survey, which was conducted between March and September, revealed the largest group of smokers — 45pc — is aged between 16 and 30.
I wonder if “despite” should actually be “because of”, though I am not sure why that should be.
The Irish Independent article is actually over a year old, but still of interest, I thought. I found it via a comment from Dave Atherton to this post by Mahendra Jadeja at Big Brother Watch.
John Crace of the Guardian writes about someone totally cool.
Max Hardberger makes his living by stealing back stolen cargo ships, beating pirates at their own game from Haiti to Russia.
Remember Paul Chambers?
Twitter joke trial: Paul Chambers loses appeal against conviction
The man convicted of “menace” for threatening to blow up an airport in a Twitter joke has lost his appeal.
Paul Chambers, a 27-year-old accountant whose online courtship with another user of the microblogging site led to the “foolish prank”, had hoped that a crown court would dismiss his conviction and £1,000 fine without a full hearing.
But Judge Jacqueline Davies instead handed down a devastating finding at Doncaster which dismissed Chambers’s appeal on every count. After reading out his comment from the site – “Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!” – she found that it contained menace and Chambers must have known that it might be taken seriously.
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As for the tweet at the centre of the case, she called it “menacing in its content and obviously so. It could not be more clear. Any ordinary person reading this would see it in that way and be alarmed.”
Has Judge Jacqueline Davies ever met an ordinary person other than in the courtroom? They have usually got over wetting the bed coz he said scawy fings mummy by the age of three.
This particular form of infantile behaviour is everywhere. There is a second example reported in the papers just today.
Tory councillor arrested over Alibhai-Brown ‘stoning’ tweet
Police in Birmingham today arrested a Conservative city councillor who sent a Twitter message saying that the newspaper columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown should be stoned to death.
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The message – now apparently deleted – said: “Can someone please stone Yasmin Alibhai-Brown to death? I shan’t tell Amnesty if you don’t. It would be a blessing, really.”
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Alibhai-Brown, who writes columns for the Independent and the London Evening Standard, said last night she regarded his comments as incitement to murder. She told the Guardian: “It’s really upsetting. My teenage daughter is really upset too. It’s really scared us.”
You’ve brought her up to be as big a baby as you are, then.
“You just don’t do this. I have a lot of threats on my life. It’s incitement. I’m going to the police – I want them to know that a law’s been broken.”
She added that she regarded Compton’s remarks as racially motivated because he mentioned stoning.
“If I as a Muslim woman had tweeted that it would be a blessing if Gareth Compton was stoned to death I’d be arrested immediately. I don’t think the nasty Tories went away.”
Waaaah! Make the nasty Tories go away! Hard to believe this is a woman in her sixties talking. The childishness she displays is pitiable, if genuine. However I rather think that along with the hiding-under-the-blankets stuff she is displaying another form of childishness – that of flouncing around in a strop and demonstrating semi-voluntary control of the tear glands.
Polly Toynbee in the Guardian back in July:
The return from a tiny government investment is probably greater in the cultural industries than any other – every £1 the Arts Council England puts in generates another £2 from commercial sources.
The UK Film Council, quoted in the Independent in August:
“But the UKFC doesn’t waste money, it makes it. For every pound it invests, the country gets £5 back.“
Ivan Lewis in the Guardian yesterday:
The National Campaign for the Arts estimates that every £1 of grant given to the arts brings a fifteen-fold return in investment into the county [Somerset].
Says it all, really. Her Majesty’s Treasury informs us that
The Office of Tax Simplification (OTS) is carrying out a review into all tax reliefs, allowances and exemptions, for businesses and individuals, across all the taxes administered by HM Revenue & Customs. The Chancellor has asked the OTS to identify reliefs that should be simplified or repealed to help achieve a simpler tax system.
As the first step of the review process, on 08 November 2010 the OTS published a complete list of tax reliefs and the approach that will be used for the Review. The list is the first time all tax reliefs administered by HM Revenue and Customs have been compiled and made available in a single document.
And here it is. All 349 kilobytes of it.
All good citizens will be happy to learn that “Expenditure incurred with regard to safety precautions at a sports ground is eligible for capital allowances.” (No. 530), although perhaps approval will be less enthusiastic for No. 603, “International organisations and their staffs are exempt from specified taxes.” It is a burden off my mind to discover in the form of No. 673 that “Suggestion awards made by employees which do not exceed £25 are exempt from income tax.” – although one might suggest that the effort put forth by lawmakers to create and tax inspectors to administer this provision probably exceeds the benefit felt by the average taxpayer. In fact that conclusion might apply to most of No.s 1- 672 and 674 – 1042 as well.
This comment by “Armaros”, made in response to a Guardian piece by Michael Tomasky about the former president’s new book, put the case well:
His whole agenda was thrown out the window on 911.
Not since the war of 1812 was the WH directly targeted by an enemy.
He was going to focus on Mexico, L American trade and education.
He recognized that only by bringing Mexico up to par with the rest of N America, can free trade be fair.
He was also for immigration reform and resisted the xenophobic tendencies of the SW states and tried to educate America about why this problem was occurring.
He can claim credit for No Child left behind, along with the late Teddy Kennedy who ran with the bill in the Senate. One of the most memorable stories of bi-partisan co-operation.
He was also instrumental in helping Africa and dealing with AIDS.
Bono and Geldof praised him for that.
His administration was also the most multiracial in American history.
He even offered the VP spot to Powell who decided against it in the end.
He choose a black S of state, a black NSA, and a Hispanic AG.
His Supreme court choices were centrist and sensible in Alito and Roberts.
He addressed crowds in Texas in Spanish and garnered more Latino votes than any republican before him, both as governor and president.
He will be of course remembered for the war(s).
Those will be judged with time. Iraq can be said to be a success. Saddam is gone as is the mad fascist ideology and tyranny. Iraq has proven that democracy can and should work among Arabs.
Most of the criticism of Iraq (aside from the fact that there was a war) was that Arabs cannot live in a democracy.
There have been 4 elections in Iraq with greater turnouts than most Western ones and one can say that democracy did take some hold there.
Afghanistan is still up in the air. I am not sure whether what was done in Iraq can be done there. However it is no longer a base for international terrorism.
In other words, Afghanistan is no longer a threat to us.
Whether it would revert to being that once Western troops leave is a fair question.
Bush was the first US president to declare the necessity for a Palestinian state. Another one of his forgotten positives which the Left omits on the regular.
What do you think?
Ken Loach made a good film in 1969. I gather he has made other films since. A Contemporary Case for Common Ownership, for instance, and something about a Glaswegian alcoholic.
My opinion of Loach as a human being was decided when I read this:
In Kes, probably Loach’s best-known film, which tells the tale of a boy who befriends a falcon, the actor playing the boy believed the bird used in the filming had been killed for the final scene in which he discovers its death. In fact, a dead kestrel had been substituted for the live bird.
Loach felt that the ordinary moral rules against causing someone (particularly a child) intense suffering through a cruel deception did not apply so long as his deception was carried out in the service of his art. The old Independent article I linked to above goes on:
Surprise and integrity are thus at the core of Loach’s purpose in life – as well as having a poke at authority whenever the opportunity arises.
His “pokes at authority” seem not to be incompatible with a not-very-surprising yearning to wiggle his way to a bit more power himself, the power, at least, to “do something” about all these people watching what they want instead of what is good for them. And him. And his friends. Here he is in yesterday’s Guardian:
We could start by treating cinemas like we treat theatres. They could be owned, as they are in many cases, by the municipalities, and programmed by people who care about films – the London Film Festival, for example, is full of people who care about films.
It is not quite clear from the article whether Loach is proposing that these municipal cinemas programmed by people who care should wholly replace the commercial cinemas and films that nobody cares about, except the millions who pay to watch them. Since he is a member of the Socialist Workers’ Party, which describes itself as a revolutionary anti-capitalist party, it is reasonable to assume that would be his ultimate goal. He continues,
Those of us who work in television and film have a role to be critical, to be challenging, to be rude, to be disturbing, not to be part of the establishment. We need to keep our independence.
Not that having you and your protegés decide what films the taxpayer will have available in the cinema he pays for would make you part of the establishment, or in any way compromise your independence, of course.
I see on Guido Fawkes that arch-Europhile Denis MacShane is to be investigated by the police. He has had the Labour Whip withdrawn.
To give him credit, he did once call Hugo Chavez a “ranting, populist demagogue”. On the other hand he was once Minister of State for Europe.
This article gives a sample of his thought.
Commenters are requested to bear in mind the principle that a man is presumed innocent until proven guilty. Yes, even a man who said:
In 2004, a major step forward was taken with the creation of a European arrest warrant
The European Union has paid out vast sums since 2001 to improve Sicily’s infrastructure. What has Sicily to show for it? Nothing. No, less than nothing:
€700 million to improve the water supply? In 2000, the water supply was “stop-and-flow” for 33% of Sicilian households, now 38.7% have water worries. Incentives to entice off-season tourists? Cost €400 million, enough to buy up an airline. And yet the ranks of those thankless tourists haven’t swelled, but petered out: from 1.2% in 2000 to 1.1% in 2007. And as to the €300 million invested in alternative energy projects great and small: it’s true, there isn’t a single hillock without its windmill now, but Sicilian output is stuck at 5% of total consumption, as against an average 9.1% for Southern Italy as a whole.
The quote is from a translation of an article in the Italian daily La Stampa and I found it via Jim Miller On Politics. Jim Miller himself comments:
And we should recognize that the best money of all to waste — from the point of view of a pork-barrel politician — is someone else’s money. There would have been less wasted in Sicily if the money had come from Italy, rather than the whole European Union, and even less wasted if the money had come from the places where it was spent.
The European Union, corrupt as it is, is on average less corrupt than Sicily. Idealistic Sicilians possibly hoped that getting their state largesse via the EU would result in less theft and waste. A vain hope, as Mr Miller or Professor Friedman could have told them.
Today’s Times has the headline:
Allies at odds over death of hostage in bungled rescue
The story is behind a paywall. It does not matter. I am only interested in the headline and whoever wrote it.
Do these people have any idea at all of what life-or-death fighting is actually like? I do not demand that they have actually done any before writing about it; little would ever be reported about war if that were the test. But they could at least have read a few memoirs, or talked to their grandfathers. Reading about the Dieppe Raid might put things in perspective.
Hint: it is not like planning a dinner party. With that sort of thing if you make a careful list of Things To Do and do them all in good time you generally can be reasonably confident that it will work out OK and if it does not work out OK, say the soufflé does not rise or the wine was too sweet, it probably was because someone bungled.
Military small group operations – by which I mean small group killings of people who can also kill you – are not like that. They always hang on a knife edge. The most skilled soldiers in the world frequently die young and frequently fail. A hand is a fraction of a second too slow on the trigger – a human mind is a fraction of a second slower than another, hostile, human mind to make sense of the confusion – and a comrade dies, or a hostage dies, and a lifetime of agonized mental replaying of that moment of failure begins.
Six hours later a headline writer in an office far away expresses his displeasure.
Is this how the EU got a Yes to Lisbon from the Irish? asks Mary Ellen Synon in the Irish Daily Mail, reprinted in the British one.
Ireland and the other eurozone countries might be suffering savage spending cuts, but the EU self-publicity budget thrives: in 2008 the Open Europe think-tank calculated that the EU was spending at least €2 billion a year on ‘information’.
Much of it bent, which is to say, propaganda. The commission actually admits that its information is bent. One of its publications declares: ‘Genuine communication by the European Union cannot be reduced to the mere provision of information’.
Perish the thought! Reducing communication to mere provision of information might mean that journalists got a handful of leaflets rather than a stay at the…
Hotel Manos Stephanie (‘the Louis XV furniture, marble lobby and plentiful antiques set a standard of elegance rarely encountered,’ the hotel brags, and so it should since the rate is listed at €295 a night for a single room).
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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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