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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There is a fuss going on in the USA over something called Air America Radio, a pro-Democrat talk-radio project. The shows have been taken off the air in Chicago and Los Angeles last week amidst a row over payments arrears.
This review published before the furore of Air America Radio is from Press Action, a bunch of US libertarians of the leftist sort. It had me in stitches.
It seems that the predominently white radio presenters have shoved off the air the black presenters in New York, when the majority of the audience is black. As a result the cricket scores and news from the Caribbean are being shunted off to slots between midnight and 5am, to the dismay of many Jamaican listeners.
Also one show involved the presenter screaming and ranting at Ralph Nader, who promptly dubbed the radio station “Hot Air America Radio”. Great job of unifying the comrades, Comrade.
I also noted that the Press Action crowd would elect Noam Chomsky for president on their site poll. The funny bit is that Bush gets 13 per cent and Kerry gets 19 per cent. If Bush gets 13 per cent of the goofy left vote, I must call my bookie.
As I recall, Air America was the name of a CIA spook job in South East Asia during the Viewnam War. Anyone thinking what I’m thinking?
Devoid of inspiration, I looked in my library and found Soviet Communism – A New Civilisation by Sidney and Beatrice Webb. There is no question mark in the title of my 1937 Left Book Club edition, and it was “NOT FOR SALE TO THE PUBLIC” (as it says on the front). And a good thing too, I muttered, as I scanned through it, looking for something particularly vile and wrong-headed for you people to have a good chuckle and a good sneer at.
Imagine my surprise, then, to encounter a paragraph of complete truth. Admittedly I had to go to page 1122 to find it, but even so, don’t you think that this is really rather good?
We place first in far-reaching importance the complete discarding, as the incentive to production, of the very mainspring of the western social order, the motive of profit-making. Instead of admiring those who successfully purchase commodities in order to sell them again at a higher price (whether as merchant or trader, wholesale dealer or retailer). Soviet Communism punishes such persons as criminals, guilty of the crime of “speculation”. Instead of rewarding or honouring those (the capitalist employers or entrepreneurs) who engage others at wages in order to make a profit out of the product of their labour, Soviet Communism punishes them as criminals, guilty, irrespective of the amount of the wages that they pay, of the crime of “exploitation”. It would be difficult to exaggerate the difference that this one change in ideology (in current views of morality as well as in criminal law) has made in the manner of life within the USSR. No one can adequately realise, without a wide study of the facts of soviet life, what this fundamental transformation of economic relationships has meant, alike to the vast majority of the poor and to the relatively small minority who formerly “lived by owning”, or by employing others for profit.
The paragraphs that follow revert to the evil drivel of which this book mostly consists, as the elderly dupes try to explain how none of this did any harm. But even so, something of a surprise.
 Perry’s tinfoil hat was off for repairs, so he had to improvise.
HM Tax Collectors are burning out, cracking up and breaking down. They cannot take it anymore. They can not eat, they can not sleep and they do not know which way to turn.
THEY NEED HELP!!!
If your tax affairs are driving you to despair, spare a thought for the Inland Revenue. It has been forced to call in the Samaritans to help to train staff driven close to the edge by dealing with irate callers struggling with the tax system.
The charity, vastly experienced in helping people who are depressed or on the verge of suicide, has been hired to train around 2,000 Revenue staff who take calls from the public.
The idea is to enable them to be more empathetic when dealing with taxpayers who have reached the end of their tether after trying to understand the shambolic tax credits system or fathom out their self-assessment form.
Or maybe it is taxpayers that are melting down? Or is it both? Who can tell? We are all going crazy round here.
Emotional training is not cheap. The Samaritans normally charge £1,500 a day for this service; it would not disclose yesterday how much the Revenue was being charged.
The ‘revenue’ is not paying a penny. Somebody better get on the telephone to those untethered taxpayers and tell them the bad news. It is all their fault anyway. Then they will get even more angry and the Revenue staff will get even more stressed and then they will need even more therapy and… How deep does this rabbit-hole go?
Perhaps the problem could be alleviated by sending the entire staff of the Inland Revenue off on a holiday… for a few years!
This has no connection with legalising drugs, abolishing income tax (see posting below) or the Samizdata.net metacontext, or no connection that I can now think of. But even so, I like it a lot:
Researchers have cracked the puzzle of how pigeons find their way home: they just follow the main roads.
…
Some pigeons stick so rigidly to the roads that they even fly round roundabouts before choosing the exit to lead them back to their lofts.
Animal behaviouralists at Oxford University are stunned by their findings, which follow 10 years of research into homing pigeons. For the last 18 months they have used the latest global-positioning technology, allowing them to track the ground the birds covered to within one to four metres.
I too am stunned, even though I am not an “animal behaviouralist”. Apparently pigeons do have an innate navigation system, but as soon as they identify a road-based route, they use that instead.
“Up until now, we have always thought about the way that birds go in terms of the energetics of the flight efficiency, which is the most direct route home … as in the phrase ‘as the crow flies’.
“But the answer is, they don’t go as the crow flies, and neither, it is my hunch, do crows. …”
No mate. Crows use the latest global-positioning technology.
There used to be a time when companies has serious names. Standard Oil. East India Company. Marks & Spencer. Ford Motor Company. Western Union. General Electric. Blohm und Voss. Consolidated Engineering.
Now companies have names like Eat My Handbag Bitch.
Perhaps the commentariat knows of some other interesting examples? God bless post-modern capitalism!
One interpretation is that it is meant to indicate, from left to right, priority of the seats should go to any person with a broken arm, a person with a child, a pregnant woman or a person with an injured leg…
Will the German embassy protest, one wonders? Hardly the spirit of reconciliation.
The Conservative Party (or as Monty Python would put it, the Silly Party) has a cunning plan to cut bureaucracy. Appoint bureaucrats to decide how much bureaucracy is really necessary!
Now why didn’t I think of that? 
Tomorrow night, chez moi, Michael Jennings is giving a talk. It’s the last Friday of the month, and a talk chez moi is the rule. He’ll be offering a comparative study of Christmas around the world. Christmas is most fun in non-Christian countries he said today, because although they like it – it’s a big party/holiday after all, and who doesn’t like a big party/holiday? – they don’t always get it. Are you going to mention the Father Christmas who got crucified in a Japanese shop window? – I asked. I was saving that he said.
Not as weird as that, but a bit weird, is this picture of Santa Claus under water at the Beijing Aquarium, stroking a giant turtle. Why? Does Santa not have enough on his plate delivering toys to children everywhere? Aren’t reindeers enough of a headache without him getting involved also with underwater creatures?
Meanwhile, here is information penned in 1997 but presumably not that out of date about Christmas in Japan. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Christmas Cakes are the two big things, apparently.
I don’t believe in ghosts but even I have to confess that this qualifies as spooky:
Closed-circuit security cameras at Hampton Court Palace, the huge Tudor castle outside London, seem to have snagged an ethereal visitor. Could it be a ghost?
“We’re baffled too — it’s not a joke, we haven’t manufactured it,” said Vikki Wood, a Hampton Court spokeswoman, when asked if the photo the palace released was a Christmas hoax. “We genuinely don’t know who it is or what it is.”
In the still photograph, the figure of a man in a robe-like garment is shown stepping from the shadowy doorway, one arm reaching out for the door handle.
The area around the man is somewhat blurred, and his face appears unnaturally white compared with his outstretched hand.
“It was incredibly spooky because the face just didn’t look human,” said James Faukes, one of the palace security guards.
“My first reaction was that someone was having a laugh, so I asked my colleagues to take a look. We spoke to our costumed guides, but they don’t own a costume like that worn by the figure. It is actually quite unnerving,” Faukes said.
Follow the link and have a good look at the photograph. At first site, I will admit that the image is quite unsettling. However, it is not a ghost. Even if one accepts that human beings can survive physical death and then flit between this world and the next in ethereal form, how, exactly, do they manage to do so while remaining fully dressed? It would take quite a lot of convincing to persuade me that garments possess an eternal soul.
So perhaps this is an elaborate fake? Or some trick of the light? If it is the work of pranksters they deserve some credit for conjuring up such an admirably creepy illusion.
If anything odd happens to the weather, they blame Global Warming and say that therefore it will get worse and that we are to blame. We Brought It On Ourselves. But it must be admitted that it, in this case, is rather startling:
BARCELONA, Spain — A Spanish-American scientific team will be scanning the United States this winter for what might be one of the weirdest byproducts of global warming: great balls of ice that fall from the sky.
The baffling phenomenon was first detected in Spain three years ago and has since been reported in a number of other countries, including the United States. So scientists now plan to monitor in a systematic way what they call “megacryometeors” — or great balls of ice that fall from the sky.
“I’m not worried that a block of ice may fall on your head,” said Dr. Jesus Martinez-Frias of the Center for Astrobiology in Madrid. “I’m worried that great blocks of ice are forming where they shouldn’t exist.”
Ice balls, which generally weigh 25 to 35 pounds but can be much bigger, have punched holes in the roofs of houses, smashed through car windshields, and whizzed right past people’s heads.
How very odd, as we say here. And as you constantly say if you are a regular reader of Dave Barry.
It’s tempting to start speculating where, and upon whom or what, we would most like one of these things to land.
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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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