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 Bush administration recently has been pummeled by a quasi-scandal involving the leak of the name of a purported CIA “covert operative.” I won’t go into any details here, as I don’t think there is any “there” there. One of the responses of the Bushies was to crack down on leakers in the administration.
This new anti-leaking policy was, of course, promptly, well, leaked.
From the Philadelphia Inquirer: “Bush told his senior aides Tuesday that he ‘didn’t want to see any stories’ quoting unnamed administration officials in the media anymore, and that if he did, there would be consequences, said a senior administration official who asked that his name not be used.”
The ambitions of the political classes are danger enough but let no-one underestimate the threat posed by the therapy culture:
New York City taxpayers are probably going to be liable not only for the physical injuries inflicted in Wednesday’s Staten Island Ferry crash — which include ten deaths and about 60 injuries resulting in hospitalization, some of them horrific — but also for damages potentially payable to all of the unhurt passengers, widely estimated to number 1,500. A “federal maritime doctrine allows all those who were in the face of danger and who suffered emotional distress to file for compensation, even if they were not physically injured”. Among likely claims, according to Columbia law dean David Leebron, are those from “passengers who claim to now have a fear of ferries that affects their ability to commute and earn a living”.
Damn, I’m thinking of making a claim myself. So what if I actually live in London? So what if I was 3000 miles away when the tragedy occured? I saw it on the news, didn’t I? As a result I have been emotionally scarred, my life has been ruined, I can’t sleep at nights, I keep getting flashbacks and…yadda, yadda, yadda.
Of course, the therapy culture wouldn’t exist at all if it wasn’t so well incentivised with rewards.
This particular article on the oral argument before the US Supreme Court concerning search and siezure doctrine doesn’t really have any looming significance for the future of planetary liberty. I mostly thought it was well-written and funny, and gives some insight into the “sausage factory” of the common law.
First, the set-up:
The Fourth Amendment bars the state from unreasonable searches and seizures. One of the things that makes a search constitutionally “reasonable” is the presence of a warrant. Another is an old common-law requirement: the so-called knock-and-announce rule. The rule is codified in 18 USC § 3109, which provides that in executing a search warrant, “an officer may break open any outer or inner door or window of a house, or any part of a house … if, after notice of his authority and purpose, he is refused admittance.” In cases of likely destruction of the evidence, or danger to life, the cops are free to bash first and knock later.
An insight into the fundamental problem with the appellate courts in the US:
Stevens is still hung up on the statute. The statute requires “refusal” to admit the cops. Silence is not refusal, he says. Salmons replies, “That is the way the statute is worded. But this court has never construed the statute to be read literally.”
Hold the phone.
This is a court that is rabid about construing statutes literally. This is a court that would read Dada poetry literally. They are strangely satisfied with this answer.
Actually, the Supreme Court, like almost any court, only reads statutes literally when that will get them where they want to go. When the words on the page of the governing authority, whether a statute or the Constitution, are inconvenient, well, then we get a lot of blather about “living documents” or “legislative intent” or whatever, until the courts feel we have been lulled into not noticing they are about to say that the governing authority says something which it clearly does not say.
Anyhow, read the article mostly for the wit and the bathroom humor. What’s that, you say? Bathroom humor at the Supreme Court of the United States?
You bet. Read the whole thing, and find out.
Despite the presence of many excellent Canadians in the blogosphere (such as this splendid chap) I don’t know all that much about Canada. My first and only visit to that country was some fifteen years ago and rarely does Canada merit any coverage in the UK media.
However, from what little I have learned I get the impression that it is a country where the left-of-centre political culture is pretty much set in stone and the ruling (and misnamed) ‘Liberal Party’ is a perennial electoral shoe-in.
Could that be about to change?
The leaders of Canada’s two rival right-wing parties said on Wednesday they were very close to agreeing on a merger to form a united conservative movement to challenge the ruling Liberal Party.
Canadian Alliance leader Stephen Harper pulled out of a town hall meeting in his hometown of Calgary, Alberta, to fly back to Ottawa for talks with Peter MacKay, leader of the Progressive Conservatives.
“We haven’t (yet) come to an arrangement but we’ve had some very positive talks and I expect to have some more very shortly, and I am very optimistic about things developing,” Harper told reporters at Calgary airport.
“It’s not often that the political landscape is altered in a big way so quickly but I think we’re very close to doing that,” he said. The tentative name for the united party would be the Conservative Party of Canada.
Interesting as far as it goes but it does beg quite a few questions, such as:
1. Is this ‘merger’ likely to happen or is this all aimless flapping?
2. If it does succeed then is the Conservative Party of Canada going to commit to rolling back the Canadian state?
And….
Polls give the Liberals the same support as all four opposition parties combined, but also show that a single right-wing party could mount a serious challenge.
3. What are their chances of climbing that electoral mountain any time soon or at all?
The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS, for the acronym-addicted) began laying out its agenda for its upcoming session by announcing the cases that it has accepted for review, and those that it has not. Among the cases that it has refused to review is the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals (federal circuit courts are the appellate courts for the federal system in the US; the 9th Circuit has jurisdiction over the West Coast) decision barring the federal government from prosecuting (or persecuting, take your pick) doctors for recommending marijuana to their patients.
The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said that physicians should be able to speak candidly with patients without fear of government sanctions, but they can be punished if they actually help patients obtain the drug.
So, this has been pitched relatively narrowly as a free speech issue, rather than as a broader liberty/self-ownership issue. That is probably a wise strategic decision on the part of marijuana advocates. I personally don’t see where the federal government has the Constitutional power to outlaw drug use in the first place, but I am old-fashioned and believe the Constitution means what it says. SCOTUS hasn’t subscribed to that view since FDR intimidated the Court into submission in the 1930s.
Nine states have laws legalizing marijuana for people with physician recommendations or prescriptions: Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Nevada, Oregon and Washington. And 35 states have passed legislation recognizing marijuana’s medicinal value.
But federal law bans the use of pot under any circumstances.
The case gave the court an opportunity to review its second medical marijuana case in two years. The last one involved cannabis clubs.
As I recall, in that case SCOTUS said that cannabis clubs could prosecuted even if they were supplying only medical marijuana users.
The optimism expressed by various advocates about the import of SCOTUS refusing to take this case is badly misplaced, in my opinion. A refusal to take a case is far short of a SCOTUS opinion upholding the ruling of the 9th Circuit, and the annals of the Court are replete with examples of cases declined, only to have the same issue come up in a different posture later on to be reversed by SCOTUS.
Still, this is qualified win for the forces of good, feel free to celebrate with your substance of choice.
The great Californian ‘brain drain’ may be about to begin:
Already the “buzz” among philosophers is that the election of the absurd Schwarzenegger, in a state already facing enormous problems, is going to lead philosophers in California, especially at UC system campuses, to start thinking about leaving.
Those selfish Arnie voters have gone and done it now. See how they like struggling along without their philosophers. Hah! Serves them right.
[My thanks to Crooked Timber for the link.]
Great piece by Mark Steyn about the Arnie Californian triumph, making entirely justified fun of the Euro-sneerers.
California’s problem was that it was beginning to take on the characteristics of an EU state, not just in its fiscal incoherence but in its assumption that politics was a private dialogue between a lifelong political class and a like-minded media. It would be too much to expect Le Monde and the BBC to stop being condescending about American electorates. But they might draw a lesson and cease being such snots about their own.
Steyn also makes the point that Arnie won not just with his classically American Immigrant biography, but with his better policies. He says he’ll cut taxes and get the Californian economy moving again. It was policy what did it. This is what the EUro-media don’t get or refuse to get. And they wouldn’t, would they?
Is Arnie telling the truth? In my opinion the best summary of his victory came from an anonymous Californian voter interviewed on Brit TV during the last few days. I have no idea when this was, or for what programme, or what the guy does for a living. But I do remember what he said. He said: “I rolled the dice. Gray Davis was the devil I know, and I know he’s running the state diabolically. Arnie says he’ll do better. I hope he’s telling the truth. My reason for being optimistic is that so far he’s done a damn good job of running his own life with fiscal effectiveness. Maybe he’ll do the same for California. I sure hope so.” Those were not the exact words, but that was the substance of it. It was impeccably logical, utterly clear-eyed. GD was a guarantee of ghastliness. Arnie has been competent being Arnie. Maybe – no certainty was expressed here, only the rational hope – maybe he’ll be competent enough to do what he promises for California. It was a democratic rerun of the Parable of the Talents, in other words. “Thou hast been faithful in a small thing, viz: being Arnold Schwarzenegger, so now we’ll make Master of a Great Thing, viz: Governor of California. And as for you, you idiot, you lose everything.”
If Arnie messes up, as Steyn makes clear, prattling away in a funny voice about how he made good as a funny voiced immigrant won’t save him from public obloquy.
Maybe we at Samizdata.net go on about this Arnie election too much here, when we ought to be telling all you Americans things you don’t know, British things.
Maybe my next posting will be about that Conservative plan to have a locally elected “Sheriff”, instead of every police force everywhere no matter how insignificant being controlled by London, and of how disdainful everyone has been about that. “I mean, my dear, who knows what ghastly people will be chosen?” I say “everyone” will be disdainful. Maybe the voters will quite like it. Although electing a Sheriff is another thing Americans know more about than we do, of course.
I know that we’re not supposed to be this gung-ho about democracy here. But if the choice is between US-democracy and EU-plutocracy – US-democracy being the system that allows body-builders etc. to become plutocrats as well and sort things out if the regular plutocrats do nothing except steal and swank around and mess things up like they do in EUrope – then I say US-democracy is often better.
The Age of Reagan: I 1964 –1980
Steven F. Hayward
Prima Lifestyles, 2001
This is a very long book (718 pages + another 100 pages of notes etc.) and it is somewhat daunting to realise that in due course a second volume will come to complete the story. It might be as well to say that this is emphatically not a biography, not even a political biography; the title and the sub-title The Fall of the Old Liberal Order make this clear. It is more a history of the times, from the anti-Goldwater landslide of 1964 to the Reagan landslide of 1980. The cumulative impression of the book itself is its richness and how its detail ministers to its analysis.
And it is a sorry, not to say a frightening tale, telling as it does of the collapse of American self-confidence and the rise of the counter-culture of self-hatred amongst its elite. The narrative is admittedly partisan, but at the very least a case that needs to be put. As for the Presidents of the period, Hayward’s judgements are that Johnson was irresolute, reacting to events minimally, Nixon misguided, obsessive and unfortunate, Ford a mere stopgap and Carter simply disastrous. All of them seemed to have underestimated Soviet malevolence and overestimated Soviet stability; for the latter the intelligence services seem to have been especially at fault.
For anyone who has been misled into thinking that Reagan was an intellectual nullity, here is ample evidence that he was an independent and original thinker, often insisting on keeping to his own line or script in face of criticism from his advisers and speechwriters. Many of his statements, which at the time seemed naive, questionable, wrongheaded or too extreme now seem merely farsighted. He was also optimistic about America and had no time for any rationale for its decline, such as Kissinger, student of the rise and fall of European states, believed in, or at least feared. Nor was he put off by the “complexity” arguments of those who despised him for his simple attitude to problems and their solutions. Some of his difficulties with his own advisers and supporters lay in persuading them that this attitude could be made plausible to the public as electorate.
As much as the first two thirds of the book, however, has little mention of Reagan, for it is a history of how the US got into the messes that Reagan, it is fair to say, rescued it from. By far the biggest mess, which he was too late to do anything about, was, of course, the Vietnam War and it is quite plain that the left-leaning media and intellectuals, combined with political ineffectiveness and downright ignorance, contributed overwhelmingly to its being lost. To illustrate US political masochism: the two “war pictures” that had the greatest negative impact on home support – execution of the Vietcong prisoner and the napalmed little girl – won Pulitzer Prizes for the photographers.
It is not exactly necessary to be reminded, but it is necessary to bear in mind that it was under two Democrat Presidents, Kennedy and Johnson, that the US entered and enmeshed itself in the Vietnam “quagmire” (though this is not a term I recall being used by the author). The muddled, incremental escalation of the conflict by Johnson is described in Ch 4. It was also a Democrat Congress, not the President, the hapless Ford, that abandoned the South Vietnamese, even refusing to supply them arms.
Even more so was Cambodia betrayed, and the dignified reproaches of their leaders, as they refused the offer of evacuation by the American ambassador, to face certain death, make sad reading (p. 408). It is a terrible comment on what the consensus was that Reagan’s characterisation of the US effort in Vietnam as a “noble cause” was regarded as eccentric and chauvinist, just as later was “evil empire” (but for the latter’s vindication see The Week, 15/2/02, p. 13).
All through the account is woven the political manoeverings of various, almost forgotten presidential hopefuls and their minions. The ups and downs of Reagan’s two bids for the Republican nomination and the campaign that won him the Presidency, are given in great detail. On the other hand, his two terms as Governor of California are more lightly sketched in (or are perhaps less memorable). A fine book, which should be better known.
Radley Balko has an article in Fox News today on a subject near and dear to my heart. Senator Fritz Hollings is at long last ending his dismal career.
This is the same Senator who in 1986 attempted a media grand stand play over the graves of the seven Challenger Astronauts. He is the luddite who can not deal with the modern world of technology and information and who wants us to return to a post-WWII world of backbreaking labour. He is the Senator who wants to make the internet safe for Disney and the RIAA.
For decades he has been the best Senator money can buy. I’m sure someone will miss him, but it certainly will not be me.
If I was a Californian I would be wary about expecting too much from the newly-elected Governor Schwarzenegger. Events may prove me wrong but I rather doubt that he will have much impact on life in California. Or even that much impact on politics in California for that matter.
Some people, however, are expecting the worst. Below is a selection on unedited posts from the forum of the Democratic Underground and I give you my assurance that these are far from being the most lurid:
This nation is jam-packed with starfuckers, let’s face it. No one seems to give a damn about issues that affect their own goddamn wallets, but “it would be soooooooo cool to have a movie star for governor, woo-hoo!!!!!!!!”
There are dozens of reasons why Colly-forn-eeya went for Arnie, but don’t underestimate the power of the starfucker vote. It is very, very closely linked to the booger-eatin’ vote.
But who will speak for the ‘booger-eaters’ if not Arnie?
No way in HELL was that recall legit. NO WAY. I don’t care what anyone says, FIX.
We all know the 2000 Pres. election was a FIX, I’d bet the farm that Jeb being re(s)elected was a fix too (keep in mind this state’s election process is brought to you by…KKKatherine Hairass). And there is NO WAY in hell that such a liberal state like California would vote for a roid freak, sexist, Nazi…unless…IT’S A FIX.
Do you honestly imagine that Arnie would work without a script?
what things would these kind of people do to us?
whenever something like this happens the innocent people always suffer first. it is not just a political enemies thing. hitler did not just go after his rivals, he went after defenseless jews. when bush and rove and that gang finally get the power they need what will happen to normal american citizens?
Ze Democrats vill be deported. California vill be ‘democratrein’. Ze pure-blooded Californian Aryan folk must haf ze lebensraum.
DU is a great place, but it would be too easy to be infiltrated and contaminated here. We need someplace online that is well-encrypted and secure from prying eyes to do our serious planning. We also will want to get in touch with ANSWER and MoveOn, work with them, maybe set up some kind of rebel high command.
And while you’re about it, get in touch with Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. They’ve got a score to settle too.
Oh come on, chaps. Stop trying to put a brave face on things. You’re a bit upset, aren’t you. I can tell. I can always tell.
It is over. Arnold basically has kicked in the teeth of the opposition with a margin of nearly a million votes over his nearest competitor, former Hispanic secessionist Cruz Bustamante.
Through the use of our secret Illuminati time communication technology (Codename Peabody), the Samizdata Editorial staff prepared deep cover for its two covert agents in California well ahead of time.
With a libertarian intelligence matter of such extreme importance facing us – regime change in one of the largest economies on this planet – we have unstintingly sent two of our finest undercover agents: Perry “007” deHavilland and Adriana “Lara Croft” Cronin to look into the matter.
They have left these shores and are expected to remain ‘in theatre’ for several weeks. We hope they will uncover details of the new governor’s purported Weapons of Mass Employment (WME’s).
Good luck and good hunting!
Agent 007 practices laying down protective covering fire…
…while Agent Lara handles team self-extraction from maddened hordes of LA socialists
I was given the names and details by an unnamed high Samizdata administration official who will remain unnamed but should of course be the target of a lengthy Blogosphere investigation so long as it is damaging to the administration and no one dares ask me any questions.
Matt Drudge is predicting a comfortable Ah-nie victory in California.
LATEST EXIT POLLS SHOW 59% VOTE ‘YES’ FOR RECALL, TOP CAMPAIGN AND MEDIA SOURCES TELL DRUDGE REPORT, 51% FOR SCHWARZENEGGER, 30% FOR BUSTAMANTE, 13% MCCLINTOCK….
My prediction: the Guardian will denounce the result as an ‘illegitimate power-grab’ before the end of the week.
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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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