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]
|
From the BBC last Friday:
Nearly 200 people have been wrongly accused by the Criminal Records Bureau of having criminal records.
The names of 193 people were mistakenly linked with convictions held on the police national computer (PNC), BBC Radio Five Live has learned.
In some cases the names of those being vetted by the bureau were similar or identical to those of actual criminals.
In others, the criminals had given someone else’s personal details to the authorities to avoid a police record.
The Criminal Records Bureau, which came into operation in March 2002, does background checks on those who work with children or vulnerable people.
They made this number of mistakes (that they already know of) in the criminal record list, which is only a minority of the population. How many would they make if the list contained, or was supposed to contain, everybody?
What is scary about this kind of thing is when the information-that-isn’t starts to really get around, into several different data bases at once. At that point it becomes extremely hard to eradicate. Something like a false reading on sexual perversion (which is what these background checks for working with children and vulberable people are all about) is liable to spring to life again after previously having been eradicated, supposedly. After all, you can’t be too careful, can you?
Alice Bachini has decided to bring her blogging career to an end. At least for now.
I really have got to the end of the blogging phase that started a year and a half ago when I created this blog under the old title you can still see if you look up the stats. I’ve said everything I wanted to say here, met lots of interesting people and had a huge amount of fun. And now my creativity is going into new demanding projects and as a blogger I’ve run out of anything original to say.
I am sure she has not run out of original things to say because people like Alice seldom do. However, operating a solo-blog is a demanding and time-intensive business and, if there are other things that she wants to do with her life then I can sympathise with the need to boldly prioritise.
She intimates that she might return to blogging at some point in the future and I certainly hope she does. The blogosphere, particularly the British end of it, needs all the voices of reason it can get.
As a parting gift, her final (if indeed it proves to be ‘final’) entry consists of a fulsome and righteous rant:
It’s fine to blow people up if your cause is anti-Americanism. Only capitalists should be pacifists: because that way, they will lose the war. Evil fucking hypocritical bastards. Every single one of them should go and live in a country whose values they actually support. But I suppose they don’t want to strap pretend bombs to their kids, give them machine guns and parade them in the streets.
In the traditions of good performers everywhere, she has left us all wanting more.
This could all be a tease (there have been hundreds of similar reports about a referendum on scrapping the pound for the euro).
The EU constitution in itself may not be worse than what the British version is mutating into. If adopted our choices become a pan-European libertarian movement or a secession.
The latter may not be as easy as the Confederate attempt in 1861 from the USA (less public support in the UK, more heavily outnumbered by the rest of the EU etc). Hopefully such a secession could be more Slovenian than Croatian.
The advantage of a referendum is that it cannot be worse than letting the Prime Minister decide alone.
The disadvantage is that it will only happen once the result is known in advance to suit the government, so that when they win, it can slip through the single currency without a vote (that is what the French government did with the Maastricht Treaty in 1992).
Either way spread the word: by next weekend we could have a live campaign on our hands.
How could I possibly pass up the opportunity to gloat over this one?
Will Hutton, Britain’s foremost critic of capitalism and an outspoken advocate for affordable social housing, is married to a property developer who has made a fortune out of selling and renting inner-city properties, often at rates which local council housing officers describe as exorbitant.
No, you don’t get it. Will Hutton is a foremost critic of capitalism for people other than Will Hutton.
Mr Hutton’s wife heads a company called First Premise, which owns and manages dozens of commercial and residential properties in London.
The company specialises in renovating rundown properties – often with the help of public grants – and then makes a profit by selling or renting them out.
The disclosure that Mr Hutton’s own family is among those capitalising on Britain’s property boom will be an acute embarrassment for him.
Nah, he will just dismiss it as a ‘right-wing conspiracy’.
The Left-wing commentator, who appears regularly on BBC television and writes in The Observer newspaper – which he used to edit – has often railed against the iniquities of the property market.
He has been particularly scornful of what he believes is Britain’s socially divisive obsession with owner occupation. Property developers, people who buy to let and middle-class families who live in gated communities have all come in for criticism.
He is trying to shame them out of their well-appointed homes so that he can snap them up on the cheap and re-sell them.
Will Hutton, eh. The High Priest of Pieties. The Sultan of Sneers. The Prince Regent of Redistribution.
Makes you wonder how many other capitalist skeletons are rattling away in the Guardian closet.
They need some stickers which say: “Warning: heading up Hamas can seriously damage your health“:
The head of the Hamas militant Islamic movement in Gaza, Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi, has been killed in a targeted Israeli missile strike on his car.
Mr Rantissi’s death came 26 days after the founder of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, was killed in another “targeted killing” by the Israeli military.
Next candidate, please.
Some months ago, David Carr and I had a quick and long forgotten conversation over the subject of withdrawal from the European Union. It is a hardy perennial that fades in and out of debate. This time, I was interested in the ‘Greenland option’ where a region had stayed loyal to the crown of Denmark but had exited the EEC. Similar constitutional anomalies bind the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man to the Crown. The option was not considered realistic because we concluded that the EU would never countenance losing larger portions of their members.
Think again! Labour MEP, Eluned Morgan, tabled a question to Romano Prodi, President of the European Commission, asking if Wales would remain a member of the European Union if it declared independence. Prodi appeared to indicate that any region declaring independence would have to reapply for membership.
Asked if a newly independent region would have to leave the EU and apply for accession afresh, Mr Prodi said: “When a part of the territory of a member state ceases to be a part of that state, eg because that territory becomes an independent state, the treaties will no longer apply to that state.
In other words, a newly independent region would, by the fact of its independence, become a third country with respect to the union and the treaties would, from the day of its independence, not apply any more on its territory.”
His answer, written on March 1, also said any application for EU membership would require negotiation and consent of other member states.
Plaid Cymru, the Welsh nationalist party, viewed the eruption as a spoiler for their spring conference and noted the constitutional implications:
But Plaid Cymru last night rubbished the claims. Jill Evans MEP described it as “nothing more than a spoiling attempt by New Labour on the eve of our Spring Conference”.
She said: “The United Kingdom is constituted as a state through the respective acts of Union in 1536 and 1707. If either act is repealed, the UK as a nation state will no longer exist. On the basis of Romano Prodi’s letter, if Wales and Scotland were to become independent, all component members of the UK including England would have to reapply for EU membership. These ridiculous claims should be treated with contempt and are pure nonsensical.”
If Prodi’s reading of European law is correct, then declarations of independence by the constituent parts of the United Kingdom, followed by the dissolution of the Union, would be sufficient for withdrawal from the European Union. This provides food for thought since the campaign for an English parliament and for English independence now has another virtuous outcome.
Good news so near St. Georges Day!
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery then surely accreditation must run it a very close second. There may well be pundits and scribblers who do not experience the frisson of pride when their work is quoted in other media but, if so, then I have never met them.
Speaking for myself, I simply love it when other people link to my articles or quote from them. Nor is my satisfaction diminished by even the smallest degree who link to my articles as evidence that I am mad, bad and dangerous to know. It’s the recognition, stupid. Even if my attributors despise every single sentiment I ever express, at least they consider me significant enough to be worth drawing to the attention of others.
However, some people take quite the contrary view. In this case, a certain Mr. Greg Truscott of the South London Press.
It seems that Mr.Truscott has been filing reports about the nasty violent crimes which occur with disturbing regularity in and around South London and which are published on-line at the South London Press website (above). → Continue reading: “Quote me and I’ll sue”
As Antoine is fond of pointing out here, the French are not totally supine in the face of radical Islamism:
Yahia Cherif, who preached in Brest, on the coast of Brittany, was deported to Algiers after being found guilty of “proselytism in favour of radical Islam” and “active relations with a national or international Islamic movement linked to organisations promoting terrorist acts”.
He was also found to have incited violence and hatred against people due to their origin. During the hearing, a lawyer representing the interior ministry cited evidence supplied by French intelligence to accuse Cherif of calling for a jihad during a sermon on March 19. The call represented a threat to national security, he said.
Cherif had also asked his followers for active support of Jamal Zougam, the prime suspect held in connection with the Madrid bombings, in which 191 people died.
Here is the case against deporting Cherif:
His lawyer argued that he did not promote terrorism but had been a victim of it, since he had witnessed his own father’s murder in Algeria. He said he feared for Cherif’s safety at the hands of Algeria’s military authorities.
I know that there is an argument that people like this just, you know, giving sermons, is just them exercising their right to free speech, but meanwhile, this man was clearly breaking French law as it actually is, and from the sound of it he certainly intended his words to give rise to actions. So my immediate reaction to this story is, in the words of the Sergeant Major with the moustache played by Windsor Davies in It Ain’t Half Hot Mum: “Oh dear. How tragic.”
As was this. Not.
The Confederate crew of world’s first submarine (or more correctly ‘submersible’) use effectively used in combat, were buried with military honours yesterday in Charleston, South Carolina. Their boat, the CSS Hunley, was discovered in 1995 and raised in 2000 from where it sank in Charleston harbour in 1864. The Hunley went down shortly after having sunk a blockading US Navy armed sloop, the USS Housatonic.
This is an interesting end to a fascinating chapter in military history
Some readers who enjoy British history may recall that period in the 18th Century when highway robbers like Dick Turpin acquired a certain notoriety as they held travellers at gunpoint and stole valuables while simultaneously charming their female victims. Like most such ‘legends’, the truth was usually rather grubbier and more unpleasant.
Well, I had an example of being charmed into surrendering a large chunk of my wealth by force the other morning. As in the USA, where working-age citizens are currently going through the chores of filing their IRS forms, the British Inland Revenue is busy getting us all ready to pay our taxes. I received a form which said, “You have been chosen to receive this new short tax return.” Golly, how grateful am I supposed to feel? I have been ‘chosen’, apparently. It is made to sound as if I have been invited on board a millionaire’s yacht off St. Tropez for a spot of weekend sailing.
Even worse, the form ends with the little motto, no doubt dreamed up by some clever chap, “Tax doesn’t have to be taxing.” Aahhhh! You see, the Inland Revenue can make the experience of telling us how much wealth we must pay out an easy, even pleasurable experience.
Why do I go on about this? Well, in a subliminal way, forms like this encourage the citizen to accept the tax burden as a natural, and even wholly benign part of the human order. It is another way of wearing us down. And that is a bad thing. Personally, I am actually glad that the Americans have a nasty time filing their tax returns because once a year it reminds the citizens of Jefferson’s Republic of just how far they have gone from the modest government ambitions of the Founding Fathers. The easier we Brits can pay our taxes, the less angry we might be about the taxes in the first place.
Of course, this all leaves aside the issue of whether, even in a minarchist or anarcho-capitalist order, we could get by without some form of collective funding for stuff like external defence and internal courts and so on. I have a few thoughts but it is too big a topic for a single blog item. I’ll have to return to this point another time. Of course that’s no reason why others cannot have a go. Comments welcome as always.
Nigel Meek draws the attention of readers of the Libertarian Alliance Forum to this leader in yesterday’s Guardian. He is right to do so. It is short enough and good enough to be worth reproducing in full, which he does for LAF, and which I do for Samizdata now:
It is difficult to find anything in the European Union more perverse than its continuing subsidy of sugar. It fails every test miserably. It is economic madness since the EU is shelling out hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ money – that could be used to reduce its growing budget deficit – to grow crops at a loss that could be better grown elsewhere. It is immoral because subsidies prevent poor countries from growing sugar that would create hundreds of thousands of jobs. It is also unhealthy because it is encouraging the subsidised output of a product that the World Health Organisation, courageously – in view of the vested interests attacking it – says we should be cutting back on.
If the figures – published in a new Oxfam report, Dumping on the World, this week – were applied to any other industry, they would be laughed out of court. Oxfam claims the EU is spending €3.30 to export sugar worth €1, an almost unbelievable support of more than 300% – and that is only part of the elaborate welfare package bestowed on the industry. These hugely subsidised exports are dumped on developing countries, snuffing out potential economic growth that could enable them to work their way out of poverty. All they want is a level playing field. Is that too much to ask for? Oxfam – quoting World Bank figures – also claims that sugar costs 25 cents per pound weight to produce in the EU compared with 8 cents in India, 5.5 cents in Malawi and 4 cents in Brazil. The world price for raw sugar is 6 cents a pound. It is bizarre that European governments reconciled, albeit reluctantly, to call centres being subcontracted elsewhere will not let go of sugar output which, left to market forces, would long ago have migrated to the third world. Sugar producers, with twisted logic, use Brazil’s low cost of output as a reason for retaining subsidies on the grounds that it will not be really poor countries benefiting, only the medium poor.
The simplest solution would be to abolish all agriculture subsidies, even though it would, in the short term, hurt a minority of poor countries that might lose out to the likes of Brazil. Once exceptions are granted, then everything is up for grabs, and trade and talks would be dragged down by interminable bargaining. If complete abolition is deemed impracticable in the short term, then at the very least Europe should commit itself at once to the complete abolition of all export subsidies, direct and indirect. Apart from the huge relief it would bring to poor countries, it would also restore Europe’s long-lost moral leadership.
It would take more than one measure of this sort to “restore Europe’s long-lost moral leadership”, but if such an unattractive delusion is what it takes to get rid of these vile and murderous subsidies – yes murderous, because economic failure is a matter of life and death, especially when inflicted upon the very poor, then so be it. Apart from that, I see nothing here to disagree with.
I posted here last summer about this blog. It is still going strong, and the ideas embodied in it still seem to be having an impact.
A cynical attempt to reach out to the pro-free-trade blogosphere, which has to get a nod from the real operation, the Guardian itself, otherwise it just looks ridiculous? Maybe, but who cares? And I am sure that Mr kick-AAS means every word of it. Ancient proverb say: window dressing often take over shop. What matters is that this kind of thing is being said, right across the political spectrum.
Wired has a follow-up reporting on the controversy surrounding the airline companies hand-over passanger data to government contractors (TSA)designing and testing CAPPSII in 2002.
Two senators on Wednesday asked the Transportation Security Administration whether the agency violated federal rules by helping its contractors acquire passenger data, and why the agency told government investigators it didn’t have such data.
The senators also pressed the TSA for an explanation of why it hadn’t revealed the transfer of millions of passenger records to government contractors. Senate members had asked TSA officials directly whether they had done so, but the answer was no.
Two TSA agency spokesmen also denied to Wired News that any data transfer had taken place, saying that the project did not need data at the time.
But this week, American Airlines became the third airline to reveal that it turned over millions of passenger records to the government without informing the passengers. JetBlue and Northwest Airlines had earlier revealed that they too had transferred passenger records to government contractors. For the past eight months, TSA officials and spokesmen have repeatedly denied that any data transfer occurred. Two senators, Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Joe Lieberman (D-Connecticut) wrote:
We are concerned by potential Privacy Act and other implications of this reported incident. Moreover, TSA told the press, the General Accounting Office and Congress that it had not used any real-world data to test CAPPS II.
American Airlines has now indicated that it provided over 1 million passenger itineraries at TSA’s request, which raises the question of why agency officials told GAO that it did not have access to such data.
And there was much fudging as you can read in the article…
|
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.
|
Recent Comments