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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Here’s a quick quiz for you… I’ll post the answers later on.
1) Whose idea was the Department of Homeland Security?
2) Who suggested the US use pre-emptive action against States harbouring WMD?
Answer: Well, one person got very close, Gary Hart was indeed involved with both of these.
These two items and a whole bunch of others are part of the final report “Road Map For National Security: Imperative For Change, PhaseIII”. This was a bipartisan two year commission which completed its’ draft final report (from which I am working) Jan 31, 2001. President Bush and his team had barely moved into their offices at the time.
The commission was co-chaired by Hart and Rudman and was tasked with a total systemic review of US National Security.
The Pentagon funded research agency DARPA are launching something called the Policy Analysis Market (PAM) which is in its own words…
A Market in the Futures of the Middle East..
and will provide…
insight into the interactions among Middle Eastern and U.S. interests and policy decisions.
This is done by letting you trade…
on data indices that track economic health, civil stability, military disposition, and U.S. economic & military involvement in Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Turkey.
…as well as other contracts. There has been some opposition to the idea. Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Byron Dorgan of North Dakota have urged the Pentagon to drop the idea stating that…
The idea of a federal betting parlour on atrocities and terrorism is ridiculous and it’s grotesque.
and …
useless, offensive and unbelievably stupid.
Trading begins October 1st
Given its intimate association with brutal and murderous ‘ethnic cleansing’ it is entirely understandable that the term ‘population transfer’ raises more than a few hackles.
But it need not necessarily be something to fear. Provided it is thought of in terms of free trade, then I can see a peaceful and voluntary process of population transfer as a beneficial thing.
Indeed, the process already appears to be underway:
A husband and wife in Minnesota, a college student in Georgia, a young executive in New York. Though each has distinct motives for packing up, they agree the United States is growing too conservative and believe Canada offers a more inclusive, less selfish society.
“For me, it’s a no-brainer,” said Mollie Ingebrand, a puppeteer from Minneapolis who plans to go to Vancouver with her lawyer husband and 2-year-old son.
Nor are these itchy feet to be found exclusively in the USA. There are people in Britain too, like this correspondent to the Guardian (concerning the death of Dr.David Kelly), who see Canada as the ‘Golden Medina’:
I think he HAD TO BE RUBBED OUT. He knew too much, where the bodies were buried, so his had to be buried as well. Maybe you’re more honest than we are: the media and the government are co=conspirators here. So good luck. I”m moving to Canada, land of the free.
Some may see this as a tragedy but I see it as an indirect means of slashing public spending. Surely it is preferable for all these guardianistas and tax-consumers to converge upon one country where they can stew in each other’s misery rather than staying where they are, demanding entitlements and whining interminably about the unfairness of it all. Together, they can truly build the kind of society they want to live in.
Of course this process need not, and should not, be a one-way street. Canada has no shortage of ambitious, hard-working people who might see their futures as somewhat sullen in the Land of the Puppeteers. The easiest solution is for them to pack their bags and head off to less stultifying climes where their talent and energy will be both appreciated and rewarded.
In fact, that is what loads of Canadians have been doing:
But every year since 1977, more Canadians have emigrated to the United States than vice versa — the 2001 figures were 5,894 Americans moving north, 30,203 Canadians moving south.
Quite what this means for Canada in the long run I dare not even imagine but for the rest of us it can only be good news. Carry on, I say.
[My thanks to the Brothers Judd for the link and to Peter Cuthbertson for the Guardian letter.]
This week New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg signed into law a provision that transfers liability for personal injuries on public sidewalks from the city to the adjacent building owner. In addition, a companion bill the mayor signed will require property owners to carry liability insurance that provides coverage for sidewalk injuries.
This legislation transfers liability for sidewalk accidents from the city to the property owners who already have the duty to keep the sidewalks in good repair.
So let me get this right. You do not own the bit of the pavement in front of your house/flat. Nevertheless, you are responsible for keeping in it good repair, clean it of snow, ice and other obstructions to pedestrians. At your own cost. For the Public Good. And you are also liable for anything that happens to your accident-prone, trigger-suing compatriots.
Call me old-fashioned but this is outrageous. The concept of being responsible for something you do not own and have no property right to is not only non-sensical but goes to the heart of your personal freedom. The New York City imposes a cost on you without any corresponding choice to dispose of that responsibility. They make you clean, repair and pay legal costs for the pavement whether you like it or not, in the name of Clean and Safe Pavements. You are made a slave to the passing pedestrians or rather the Public in general, which of course is a patriotic and public-spirited thing. That sounds familiar…
Oh, and now you are also forced to buy insurance to pay for the liability you have no choice in incurring. It seems that New York Mayor sees property rights his way.
The Bush administration may be in the process of revolutionising America’s foreign policy but, on the domestic front, it seems like business as usual:
The Bush administration, pressing its campaign against state medical marijuana laws, has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to let federal authorities punish California doctors who recommend pot to their patients.
The administration would revoke the federal prescription licenses of doctors who tell their patients marijuana would help them, a prerequisite for obtaining the drug under the state’s voter-approved medical marijuana law.
And, of course, his predecessor was no better:
Contending that the drug has no medical value, the Clinton administration announced in January 1997 that doctors who recommended marijuana would lose their licenses to prescribe federally regulated narcotics. Doctors in many fields need federal licenses to remain in practice.
Proof that, regardless of who is sitting in the hot-seat, the absurd and insane ‘war on drugs’ just has to go on and on and on.
[My thanks to Dr.Chris Tame who posted this article to the Libertarian Alliance Forum.]
George W Bush has agreed to send up to 1,000 troops to Liberia. CNN reports that he took the decision after a meeting of his National Security Council. An announcement was expected, possibly today, that the US troops will head an international peacekeeping force.
Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary-general, had urged the UN Security Council to dispatch a force “to prevent a major humanitarian tragedy” in an upsurge in fighting between factions engaged in a 14-year conflict that has killed a tenth of Liberia’s population.
Apart from embassy protection detachments, the marines will be the first American soldiers deployed in Africa since the withdrawal from Somalia nearly a decade ago. Britain, France and some African countries had called on America to lead it because of its historical links with Liberia, founded in 1822 as a settlement for freed American slaves.
Comments by White House press secretary Ari Fleischer that Bush was considering sending troops provoked a nearly instantaneous reaction in Monrovia, where thousands of people gathered outside the U.S. Embassy to cheer a possible American presence. One man said:
We feel America can bring peace because they are the original founders of this nation, and secondly, they are the superpower of the world.
Strange, Liberians do not seem to have a problem with that…
I post this on Thursday afternoon, just ahead of the day when our American friends take a break from the office, farm and factory to commemorate the birthday of their country.
And may these words stand, forever, as the guiding principles of the greatest nation on this planet.
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
PS. Could we have the tea back from Boston, please?
PPS. Could we borrow this when it comes time for Britain to leave the EU, please?
Last week I posted a scan of a rather tattered magazine picture of Strom Thurmond surrounded by marshmallows on the stage of the CMU Skibo Ballroom, circa 1970.
It seems the original student photographer is one of our readers. This blast from the past duly reminded him of this classic image and he has sold it to Reuters. You can see a much better copy of Jerry Siskind’s photo there.
This is likely to lead to a lengthy exchange of do-you-remembers betwixt us!
The Dissident Frogman has returned from his trip to Normandy, where he visited, among other things, the Musée Mémorial de la Bataille de Normandie (Memorial Museum of the Battle of Normandy) in Bayeux… He is, as always full of interesting observations and has a new game for his readers. It is called “Guess what’s missing at a museum dedicated to the Battle of Normandy, 1944?”
The game consists of three incredible pictures. My first reaction was – ‘surely, they could not go that far’. But alas, it is true. What’s more, he couldn’t get any lucid and convincing explanation for this “fortuitous” accrual.
Please go here to ‘play’ and perhaps engage in shooting off a few emails to the Mayor of Bayeux…
With the exception of the judgement by the Supreme Court to overturn the Texas anti-sodomy law, the last few days have seen some bad judgements in both the United States and Britain.
Indeed even the sodomy case was dodgy – in that a good result was achieved by, I suspect, bad methods.
True I have not been able to bring myself to read the judgements (reading the words of modern judges tends to make very depressed), but unless they used the elastic Ninth Amendment (which, perhaps, could be used to stop the Federal, State of local governments doing just about anything – which might be no bad thing) it is hard to see how the six judges found anything in the Constitution to prevent the State of Texas banning sodomy. I suspect that the judges tended to waffle on about freedom – i.e. expressed their political opinions (which I happen to agree with this time) rather than actually based the judgement on the text of the Constitution (as they should have done).
As for the other cases that have caught my eye.
Well the University of Michigan has been told that it is okay to practice racial discrimination – as long as it is not open and honest about doing so (diversity waffle rather than an overt quota). This would seem to be the worst of both worlds. Of course there is an easy way to solve the problem of who goes to State Universities – close them down and have no one go to them. However, whilst they exist, it would seem reasonable that such places do not make skin colour a factor in admissions (but five of the Supremes think differently). Oh well, who reads the 14th Amendment anyway – ‘equal protection of the laws’? No, let us have ‘diversity’ instead (although the Constitution does not mention the word diversity anywhere).
Then there was the Nike case. The Supreme Court decided that if a company decided to argue back against attacks made on it, the company may be taken to Court under California’s wonderfully biased statutes. In short the First Amendment applies to ‘activists’ (individuals or groups) attacking a company, but not to the business itself.
Back in Britain we have just had the long predicted outcome to the mobile phone (cell phone) farce. Some time ago the government manipulated some mobile phone companies into paying vast sums (billions of pounds) for mobile phone licences – this put these companies into financial difficulty. Fast forwards a few years later and the government declared that companies must cut their call rates.
In short the companies had paid through the nose and then got hit on the nose. They sued – and have just lost.
The old saying is proved right yet again – never trust the government.
And remember, the courts are part of the state.
I read of Strom Thurmond’s demise at the ripe old age of a century and it sent me digging madly through an old trunk for this most memorable magazine photo of his 1970 visit to my alma mater:
This was at the hieght of the Viet-nam anti-war movement at CMU and Pitt and students of those universities formed a coalition of the willing to pepper the good Senator with Marshmallows.
My guerilla theatre troop later used the deadly Cluster Marshmallow against the Pittsburgh Federal Building with equally devastating results. One of the troop told me a checkout clerk at the grocery store asked him, “What Senator is in town this week?”, when he purchased the case of them for our “event”.
Oh the Horror! The Horror… and the memories. God it was fun!
The BBC has a great, big monkey on it’s back and that monkey is America. The nabobs who run that state broadcast organisation just don’t understand how a country that (in their eyes) does everything wrong can end up so supremely dominant in terms of power, wealth and influence, while a country that does everything right (such as France) seethes and whines impotently about the unfairness of it all.
You can see the tension in their news reportage, torn as it is between a horrified revlusion of America and, at the same time, an unquenchable fascination. That was very much on display tonight in a 90-minute TV special run on BBC2 and called ‘What the World Thinks of America’.
Despite all the negative polling data that was apparently gathered from all around the world and a studio in London that consisted of people like firebrand British leftie Claire Short and former French Culture Minister Jack Lang, it was not the belligerent anti-American hate-fest that I thought it was going to be. What amused me most was general agreement that the USA was rich because of its economic model and, at the same time, a complete rejection of the idea of copying it.
In fact, it was rather dull, equivocal and not quite sure of itself. The underlying theme was largely one of self-pity and petty jealousy culminating in a morose admission that America was the unchallengable world superpower and there isn’t much the likes of France can do about it except whine and bitch. They may as well have called it ‘Inferiority Complex – The Movie’.
Over on the BBC website (and doubtless in anticipation of forthcoming EU regulations) they have provided a forum for Americans to answer back, hosted jointly by the respective Chairmen of Democrats and Republicans Abroad.
Perhaps some Americans might waggishly suggest an US TV special called ‘What Americans Think of the EU’. Now that I would pay to see.
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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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