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 UK Labour Party, having set in train the laws making possible the recent postal voting scandal in Birmingham, are no doubt hoping voters forget all about it in a day or so. Former Home Secretary David Blunkett, however, has done his bit to keep the light shining on the issue with a typically idiotic proposal: solve the fraud problem with ID cards.
So, let’s get this right. The government, having created a system ripe for fraud and abuse, has one of its former members suggest that it be dealt with creating a system ripe for fraud and abuse.
The Tories should give up now. They cannot compete with genius like this.
(Side observation: this whole affair underscores why some libertarians don’t believe that democracy is a particularly reliable firewall against the corruption of power).
The British Army is making a new regiment operational with a dedicated anti-terrorist mission in mind, called the Special Reconnaissance Regiment. Much of the manpower will come from 2 Para bn and 14 Intelligence coy:
CGS statement 1st April
The SRR will draw personnel from existing capabilities and recruit new volunteers, both male and female, from serving members of the Armed Forces where necessary. Officers are keen to recruit those of Middle Eastern or Mediterranean appearance, as well as Muslims and members of ethnic minorities. Priority at recruitment must be given to those able to infiltrate or blend in with Islamic terror groups, rather than to their fitness or fighting capabilities.
There has been chatter about the unit from irrepressible insiders since the middle of last year (the name Reconnaissance and Surveillance Regiment was mooted) but the firm news is hitting the mainstream media now that the unit is going operational.
The badge seems to me to be referencing the Artists’ Rifles insignia, which seems appropriate give the Artists’ Rifles special forces lineage.
How do scientists work? Do they spend a lot of their time holed up in big buildings with lots of fancy equipment, work in large teams or mostly alone, with rumpled air and just a blackboard and lump of chalk trying to figure out the laws of physics? What sort of social lives do they lead and how do they handle the political, business and personal demands that come their way? How do they deal with hostility from jealous colleagues, skeptical review boards and college principals worried about expanding their budgets?
If you ever wanted to know some of the answers to these questions as well as have a rattling good yarn told, then this book, an old classic by Gregory Benford, fits the bill. I have been engrossed in it for the last few days and I won’t spoil for any would-be readers by giving the ending or basic plot away. Let’s just say that this book actually gave me the feeling of actually working and living in a science lab, of hanging around scientists in the early 60s and later, in a sort of crumbling, environmentally troubled 1990s. Strongly recommended.
Much has been said about the Labour Party’s election catchphrase “Britain forward not back”. It has been claimed that the phrase was stolen from The Simpsons. As The Times pointed out in February:
[In an episode of The Simpsons] Clinton appears during a presidential debate. “My fellow Americans,” he proclaims. “We must move forward, not backward, upward not forward, and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom.”
Last night Labour said it had not deliberately appropriated the slogan from The Simpsons, but MPs said it was another example of a Milburn faux pas.
At the time of the controversy, I watched Milburn on the TV saying that it wasn’t stolen from The Simpsons. I do believe he was right. It actually came from the Tories. When Michael Howard was elected leader, BBC News wrote:
He urged his colleagues “to look forward, not back” and to recognise that Britain had changed since the Tories first came to power in 1979.
My good friends who run the Big Blog Company do not like to use Samizdata to promote the Big Blog Company as much as they might, because this is not cool. It is not good blogging practice. But I am only doing this incidentally when I link to the latest posting on their blog. My main purpose is to promote myself, which I suppose is not all that cool either, but there you go.
Said I, here:
A new market is chaotic, and (and this is the point) ignorant. People do not, e.g., know how to spot cowboy operators, or bad products made in all sincerity but badly. Ignorance and foolishness abound, and so to start with, down goes the graph of achievement. . . .
And, back from her tBBC promotional trip to LA, Jackie D said, this very morning, this:
Unfortunately, I wasn’t making it up when I recounted to her how one PR flack we met in LA boasted of how his firm lies to big corporations and promises them good coverage on their “big traffic,” fake blog. The blog itself has been set up by the PR company for the express purpose of scamming companies into paying out substantial amounts of cash for positive postings on it. Looking at the blog, it seems to be authored by an anonymous nobody . . . who just so happens to pepper his commentary with glowing mentions of the PR company’s clients, and negative remarks about their competition.
That is a classic description of how a genuinely new market (as opposed to a made-to-sound-like-a-market governmental rearrangement of a non-market) starts out by working – i.e. not working.
Stay with it guys. In the long run, you will get rich. If you can still be there when the long run starts to run. Eventually all those corporations will start to really understand blogging, and to want help to do the real thing.
To continue my own quote:
. . . But then, if this really is a true market, things bottom out and start to improve and in the longer run the result is a market that is orders of magnitude better . . .
Or, to put it another way:
This sounds like it could have an affect on the forthcoming election, not just on the numbers of votes that go this way or that, but on what gets said during the campaign. It makes our Labour government look bad.
The judge in a vote-rigging trial says the postal voting system is “wide open to fraud” and has strongly attacked the government’s attitude to the problem.
Richard Mawrey QC was speaking as he ruled there had been “widespread fraud” in six Birmingham council seats won last year by Labour.
He accused the government of being not only complacent, but “in denial”, about the failings of the system.
The lawyer representing the accused in this case has just been on Newsnight, and he came as close as you can (with the look on his face rather than with his mere words) to saying that his clients are a pack of liars. That was a fun moment. This is a ticklish matter for the media, because the people doing these frauds are … er … ethnic.
Now Sion Simon, a local MP right next to where this happened, and something of a Labour attack dog in the Norman Tebbit mould, is saying that there is no systemic problem. Paxman is being quite rough on him. Simon Hughes for the Lib Dems, and a Conservative whose name I did not catch, are saying that there is a systemic problem. And of course, although this row has been simmering for some time, there is now no time to do anything to the system except urge vote counters and returning officers to be extra-vigilant.
Just how bad this will be for the government, I do not know. Maybe in a couple of days it will all be forgotten by almost everybody. But however this particular story plays out in the next few days, I get the feeling that, in Britain now, a political corner has been turned, some time during the last few months.
Whether the electorate as a whole has any plans to vote differently remains to be seen. Many of my friends, such as regular Samizdata commenter Paul Coulam to name but one, have said to me that Blair is about to be re-re-elected with a similar majority to last time around, just as Thatcher was. Coulam certainly said this to me a few weeks back. But governments take a long time to unravel, and what does seem to have happened is that the metropolitan media of Britain have got bored with Labour. They are now more bored with Labour than they are disgusted and embarrassed by the Conservatives, which was not true a year ago. Michael Howard may disgust many Samizdata readers by being just another opportunist political hack, but he is nevertheless, I would say, a much more impressive and consequential figure than his two predecessors at the head of the Conservative Party.
Now, Paxman is talking about what life is like in North Korea. Apparently people who have tried to escape from that hell hole, to heaven, otherwise known as China, are being executed in public, with everyone else in the town rounded up and forced to watch. Someone even managed to film one of these horror shows, and the BBC showed it. “Worst human rights record of any country in the world.” Count your blessings time.
Interesting story here that a firm which is said to be behind a lot of the spam messages hitting our mailboxes could go bust. Perhaps, just perhaps a corner might be turned in the current battle against spammers. I used to think that one man’s junk mail message was another’s piece of legitimate advertising, but the relentless offensive and downright moronic crud I have to sweep from my computer each day has made me change my mind. The effectiveness of the Internet as a business and social tool has been seriously blunted by this phenomenon.
I still don’t really know whether spam can be best dealt with legally, economically or through some other means. What I do know is that I won’t be shedding any tears at the demise of one of the most prolific producers of this stuff in the world.
Dale Amon is too busy to blog about this himself, but emails the rest of us with news about this, from Novosti:
Russia still leads the way in space exploration. Russia’s Clipper reusable spacecraft will be unveiled during the 2005 MAKS aerospace show in Zhukovsky near Moscow. This spacecraft, which is developed by the Energia corporation, will seat six people. The Clipper, which can fly to the moon, can also be used for reaching the Red Planet. This was disclosed to Izvestia by Anatoly Perminov, general director of Russia’s Federal Space Agency.
Quite where the Energia corporation now sits in the public-private spectrum, I do not know. I suspect that both state money (bad) and the desire for commercial gain (good) are involved here, a lot. But most of all, I suspect that the plain old-fashioned desire to (best of all) fearlessly and braving all dangers get out there and to courageously explore new frontiers and to ruthlessly (and whatever is the Russia equivalent) split infinitives, etc., is what is really going on.
Good for them. The Russians have not had much to cheer about lately. This kind of thing may be expensive, and “irrelevant”, no answer to poverty, blah blah, but it will surely make at least some of them a bit happier.
It makes me think of that moment in 10 Things I Hate About You, one of the recent-ish Hollywood products that I did like a lot despite these Hollywood moans, when, after a surprisingly successful date with the object of his affections, that young guy who was also in Third Rock from the Sun, thinks about it all, and then grins hugely and smacks his steering wheel with both hands and shouts: “And I’m back in the game!”
The Passport Service (UKPS) is working with the Home Office on the processes required for integrating the issuing of passports with the planned national identity card scheme.
The government’s ID Cards bill includes plans to set up a new independent government agency to administrate the central identity register at the heart of the scheme and to issue the cards. UKPS will be taken over by the new organisation.
According to the UKPS business plan 2005-10, published last week, a key task is establishing the business processes needed to issue passports and ID cards.
For the period 2007-10 there will be continued development of the passport processes, but also (potentially) full integration with the Identity Cards Scheme, as we move to start issuing British citizens with a passport book/identity card package and to establish the National Identity Register.
At Australian wineries it is possible to buy port in ten litre containers.
Alas, I found the prospect of getting this onto the plane and through British customs a little daunting, so I did not buy one. Which is a shame, as I would have been delighted to have been able to serve port out of a plastic container that looked more suitable for engine oil at my next dinner party.
– Michael Jennings
Michael Blowhard’s latest posting is one of his link fests, to video clips this time. He says he now prefers internet video bits to regular Hollywood movies.
It saddens this longtime film buff to say it, but I’m having a better time these days browsing video clips on the Web than I am watching most new movies.
I know the feeling. I do not indulge in internet video clips, but I am finding the movies duller and duller as the years go by. But I do not think this is because the movies are necessarily any worse. It is just that I have learned all I want to from the movies, and I have seen all the stories. I know the formulae. I now actually tend to prefer clever movies from Europe with subtitles, because I do not know how they are going to end, and because the people in them now seem more interesting and more real. Time was when it was the subtitled movies that were dull and the Hollywood stuff that was exciting. So has Hollywood changed? I doubt it. Have I changed? That seems far more likely.
Friedrich, the other Blowhard, has a similarly low opinion of current Hollywood mainstream fare, and reckons it may be something to do with the fact that the big studios now make their real money not in the cinemas, but from DVDs, and other spin-off products such as video games. But a launch platform, to do that job well, still has to be good, does it not? If so many other kinds of business rest on these platforms, all the more reason to do them well, surely.
I tried a few of Michael’s links to video clips, although I fear that investigating the porny ones too enthusiastically would be to invite all kinds of nasty Dark Side forces to encamp themselves on my hard disc.
My favourite one was the first one linked to, which features a most unusual species of octopus:
When walking, these octopuses use the outer halves of their two back arms like tank treads, alternately laying down a sucker edge and rolling it along the ground. In Indonesia, for example, the coconut octopus looks like a coconut tiptoeing along the ocean bottom, six of its arms wrapped tightly around its body.
Apparently, this is a fairly recent discovery:
“This behavior is very exciting,” said Huffard, who first noted it five years ago in the coconut octopus but only recently was able to capture both types of octopuses on film. “This is the first underwater bipedal locomotion I know of, and the first example of hydrostatic bipedal movement.”
Although, I have to say that one of the best things about this item was how little time it took to enjoy it, unlike a Hollywood movie like Miss Congeniality 2, which is the one that Friedrich Blowhard was especially complaining about.
I really liked Miss Congeniality 1. If Miss Congeniality 2 is boring tripe, no more amusing than being told the same joke all over again, this should be no particular surprise. The surprise is when Whatever It Is 2 is really good, like with Godfather 2 or Terminator 2, or with James Bond number 2. Why? Because making a film good enough to have a sequel is very hard, and for the follow-up to be as good or better is a huge coincidence. I reckon Friedrich B was just particularly angry about MC2 and blamed all of Hollywood, instead of just the people who made MC2.
Relax, mate. Pour yourself a drink and have a look at the walking octopus.
He has gone. As I said a few days ago, Pope John Paul II was one of the great figures of our age. However controversial a figure he may have been for his views on issues like abortion, birth control and capitalism, the late Pope was, in my eyes, a hero for playing a part in giving people in Eastern Europe the confidence to bring the Soviet Empire down.
In the days and weeks to come, people far more qualified than me will want to draw out the implications of the life of a very great Pole. At this point, all this lapsed Christian-can can say, is, “Thank You.”
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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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