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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As someone often accused of never having one word for a subject, where three hundred and fifty seven will do, I am afraid the following act of collectivized lunacy has simply left me stumped. Gazumped. And just plain flummoxed.
A National Health Service surgeon, from the Queen’s Medical Centre in Nottingham, has been suspended on full pay, for a week now, in a row over whether he took too many croutons to go with his lunchtime soup.
No, I am really not making this up.
I particularly like the comment from some idiot going under the name of Lord Warner:
I am reliably informed that there will be no detriment to patients, because the work that that doctor was due to perform will be covered by his colleagues
Tell you what, to save NHS costs let’s sack every surgeon in the entire country except one, who can cover all the rest. There will be no detriment to patients, obviously. We just better make sure we have a fleet of helicopters ready to whizz him about the country and a good supply of amphetamine pills to keep him awake.
Like I said, words fail me. Just pick your own croutons from the following word soup and gently flavour with Basil:
Parasites. Fools. Cretins. Croutons. Bananas. Idiots. The sooner the NHS is privatized the better. Monkey nuts. Lickspittles. Guardian-reading Enemy Class. Arse. Feck. And of course. Drink. Lots and Lots of Drink.
I particularly like Monkey nuts.
Brace yourselves for a truly shocking prediction:
Tax rises are inevitable if Labour wins the next election, according to an influential group of economists.
Just think, if it were not for this ‘influential group of economists’ none of us would have had even the merest inkling that increased taxes were even remotely possible.
Trafalgar Square is located at the geographical centre of London and, next to ‘Big Ben’ and the Houses of Parliament, it is probably this country’s most famous landmark.
Named after the 1805 battle, the Square is dominated by a 200 foot column on top of which is perched a bust of the Horatio Nelson, the Admiral who let the Royal Navy to victory over the French and thereby saved Britain from Napoleonic invasion. The column that bears his name and image was built from donations offered up in tribute by a grateful nation.
In the four corners of the Square there are four plinths. Three of them are occupied by statues of King George IV, General Charles Napier and Major General Sir Henry Havelock. The fourth plinth is empty and has been since around the middle of the 19th Century.
A few years ago I became vaguely aware that there was something of a campaign to find an appropriate monument to place on the fourth plinth. I say ‘vaguely’ because I paid little attention to this campaign, partly because I have better things to do with my time and partly because I learned that the process was to be decided by means of a competition under the auspices of the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone. I anticipated that I would most likely disapprove of the outcome.
My instincts proved trustworthy yet again for, this last week, the winner was unveiled.
As you may already have guessed from the image, Ms. Lapper has never led anyone into battle nor has she ruled a kingdom. Instead, she has managed to bear a child despite being quite severely disabled. → Continue reading: We are the masters now
The drivers of Britain’s famous black cabs, especially those widely used in London, are renowed for the robust independence of mind they bring to their job. Enterprising, hardworking and usually full of sharp intelligence, the drivers of our black cabs are a welcome reminder that parts of the British economy are in fine fettle. (My only beef is that they all seem to be West Ham soccer fans).
The same holds true north of the border, I am glad to say. This week I was up in Scotland for a business conference and on my way from Edinburgh Airport, the driver immediately felt free to tell me what he thought of British finance minister Gordon Brown (also a Scot) and his budget. (Brown delivered his budget speech to the House of Commons on Wednesday).
It is fair to say that this obviously hardworking driver despised the whole tax-and-spend culture of the present Labour government. The driver waxed lyrical in his hatred of Scotland’s new spendthrift and recently devolved parliament, wasteful public spending across the board, and of course, the ludicrously bloated costs of the new Scottish parliament building. The latter subject, in particular, is a scandal of monstrous proportions. The people of Scotland are truly steamed up on this issue.
My driver was true to the bracing laissez faire values of that great Scot, Adam Smith. My only problem, though, was that I understood only about a third of what the chap said.
It would appear from yesterday’s UK budget, before my accountant gets through the smallprint, that Gordon Brown has decided one million small UK businesses hold just too many awkward voters to browbeat in one go. So he has only smacked us with a light tap rather than the full hammer of state retribution he was muttering about earlier in the month.
There is still a Section 660 court case, with a judgement due in June, where he may yet succeed in fully wrecking the small business sector, just as he managed to do recently with the UK film industry, and the IT contractor sector several years ago, with his IR35 measure, but I’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.
What really puzzles me, however, is why whenever he deliberately introduces tax loopholes, to apparently encourage small businesses, instead of financial journalists just praising him in newspapers the damned small businesses actually take advantage of his faux largesse. Which means he has to get all moody and pompous before closing his own damned loopholes down again. → Continue reading: The cleverest man in the world
This morning I caught a train from south London into Waterloo, as I often do. There was a significantly larger police presence at Waterloo station than I am used to. It was not intended to be large enough to cause anyone to panic, but it there were certainly more police there than there were last week. Some of the police were carrying handguns. (Police in Great Britain are not normally armed). I then walked over one of the Hungerford footbridges that connect Waterloo and the South Bank Centre with Charing Cross Station on the other side of the Thames. Walking across the footbridge were two policement, one of who was carrying a sub-machine gun. (One normally only sees such things at airports, or outside the US embassy, or somewhere like that). At Charing Cross over the river there was again a more substantial police presence than I am used to, and again quite a few of the police were armed.
This was all actually clearly intended to be pretty low key, but I could feel the unmistakeable sense that the police and security forces are nervous at the moment. After the events in Spain last week, they should be. I am nervous. But seeing this kind of response on the streets is certainly something that makes me feel closer to it.
Yesterday I marvelled at the notion that David Blunkett had the gall to suggest that victims of miscarriages of justice should be charged for ‘room and board’. That this has not featured on the front page of every newspaper in Britain is also shocking to me. It seems to me that when there has been a miscarriage of justice, the state should bend over backwards to make amends as fulsomely as possible and make lavish restitution for damages done both directly and indirectly for the life it has unjustly disrupted. If justice is administered ‘in the name of the people’ then surely amongst the endless litany of grotesque uses of the public purse that consume billions and billions of pounds, this would be a rare legitimate public charge that few would dispute.
However what is even more baffling to me that the Tory Party is not queuing up in the Commons to denounce Blunkett in the most extreme language allowed in Parliament. Why are they not trying to use this latest affront to common decency and natural justice and using it to paint the Labour Party as the party which tramples over civil liberties? They should be relentlessly calling for Blunkett’s head over this and what do I hear? The sound of silence. Anyone who harbours delusions that the party of Michael Howard will be their champion for civil liberties against the ever more authoritarian Labour government really needs to see them for what they really are.
Regardless of whether or not the government manages to get this measure accepted or not, the mere fact Blunkett can even suggest such a thing without sparking clamourous calls for his removal from office is both a damning indictment of the moral and political vacuity of Britain’s political parties and a chilling measure of state of Britain’s culture. I sincerely hope to be proved wrong and see a ground swell of anger emerging in the press and polity in the next few days but I am not holding my breath. It would be interesting to hear the views of some of Britain’s blogging Members of Parliament on this issue.
Given my extremely low expectations, it takes a lot for a British government to actually amaze me.
Well they have managed to do exactly that. The people who rule us are not misguided, they are actually evil.
It is a very nervous time for those of us in Britain stupid enough to be self-employed, in this age of grasping government. Because Gordon Brown is desperately short of cash and he is also desperately scared of raising any more income tax from voters employed by large organisations. So where does that leave him? It leaves him staring at me and a few other hardy self-employed souls standing out here in living-on-our-own-wits land, ready to take the hit to fill his £10 billion black hole of unfunded borrowing.
Gordon Brown is a great fat sweating thieving spurt of the devil and I hate him with every twisted fibre of my being. But I think I am going to hate him even more on Thursday morning, after his UK government budget statement on Wednesday, because the small print is almost certainly going to show me owing Her Majesty’s Government up to 70% of my direct ill-gotten income, which I currently exploit out of the oppressed banks and City corporations of England.
If he does do this, by making me pay all sorts of national insurances on dividend income, for benefits I am ineligible to claim, to try to effectively turn me into an employee of the state, he may be clever enough to remove all of the wheezes we use out here in self-employed land, to get ourselves off the hook.
→ Continue reading: Entering Gordon’s black hole
There is something very Georgian and 18th Century about this but I suppose it qualifies as entrepreneurialism of sorts:
The final punch lands, exploding the fighter’s nose into the braying crowd, and the broken, unseeing, bare-knuckle boxer submits. The winner lifts his bleeding hands in celebration, knowing the victory won by his fists will line his pockets.
Welcome to the boxing underworld of bare-knuckle fighting, where the exhausted victor can hobble away with as much as £50,000 in cash.
Tax-free cash as well I should think.
These brutal confrontations have long been outlawed. But even now in country lanes, fields, barns and warehouses, grown men are pitting themselves against each other to settle old scores – and earn big money – at the risk of appalling injuries.
A reaction to the ‘risk aversion’ culture, perhaps?
Organisers say the police rarely break up a fight – it’s easier to let the contest finish naturally than risk a riot.
Also they might get the crap beaten out of them.
Ricky English, an unlicensed promoter, has signed up hundreds of fighters in the three years since he started in the fight promotion game. It is big business – he is organising fights up and down the country, charging spectators up to £50 a head.
“This is for the novices,” he said. “Fighters won’t go amateur any more. They’re sick of all the rules, the standing counts and the tap, tap, tapping. They want to have a fight and earn money. And they’re earning money.”
So is he trying to tell us that overregulation has spawned a thriving ‘underground’ industry?
“It’s great fun. I had one fighter with a glass eye who’d take it out before a fight. Crowds just love it,” said Rocky Rowe, who promoted unlicensed fights for many years. “It’s a bit like karaoke.”
Surely it cannot be that painful?
Equitable Life is a mess, that is for sure. The responsibility of making sure the people who look after your money can be trusted ultimately lies with the owner of the money… the pensioners, the beneficiaries of what Equitable Life actually does. However if fraud or other gross misrepresentation is involved, and not just incompetence, ineptitude or misfortune, then things do change somewhat as it becomes a criminal matter.
However Equitable Life is massively regulated, so many of its weird business decisions must be seen within the context of the weird distorted environment within which it operates…
So yes, there is an argument that as the state should therefore also be liable for the mess. But then if you accept that, given that the British economy grows more regulated by the day, that would suggest investors should be lining up to claim tax money from the state every time anything goes bust. After all, what makes Equitable Life’s casualties any different from the casualties of any other business cock up?
What happens when idiotarian values, movements or policies collide? When EU clashes with animal rights activists…
Thousands of animals face laboratory tests involving industrial chemicals because of new European Union legislation. The EU measure, called Reach (Registration, Evaluation and Authorisation of Chemicals), is intended to impose strict regulation on Europe’s chemical industry. It will require new laboratory tests on animals for 30,000 separate chemicals currently in production in Europe. At present, each country has its own laws governing testing.
In reply to Dr Spink’s question, Alun Michael, the rural affairs minister, said Reach required 20,000 chemicals to be tested on at least 25 animals – a total of 500,000 tests. Another 4,000 substances would require 1,500 animal tests each – six million in all. The number of tests for the remaining 6,000 chemicals was not stated.
Or when “environment-friendly” energy sources meet conservationists…
Wind farms – the “environment-friendly” energy source – are threatening to push the golden eagle, one of Britain’s rarest birds, into extinction. Conservationists say that the rapid spread of the farms in Britain – encouraged by Government subsidies for renewable energy projects – poses a grave threat to birds of prey. Other species at risk are osprey, red kites, merlins, kestrels, honey buzzards, ravens and peregrine falcons.
Both of these articles in one day. More and faster, please.
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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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