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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It is not enough for some bureaucrats just to loaf about, coming in late, going home early, taking long lunches, and generally living the life of medieval lords and ladies. No, a few of them actually try to find work to do, usually to please their political masters, to make it look as if politicians and civil servants are in some way useful. So, in a bid to justify their taxpayer-funded index-linked pensions, the boys and girls in Britain’s Office of Fair Trading (OFT) have decided to launch an investigation into an alleged price-fixing scam amongst Britain’s three largest cigarette companies. Is there any evidence? If there is, it’s probably been written on the back of a fag packet, after some boozy Friday in Whitehall.
Did somebody forget to tell the OFT that of every £4 pounds spent on cigarettes, in the UK, £3 pounds and twenty pence goes to big fat Gordon, in the Treasury, to waste on Cabinet Office taxi fares, in the biggest monopolistic price-fixing scam of all? So the cigarette companies, those unacceptable faces of capitalism, whose golden goose profits prop up Her Majesty’s Government with billions in tax every year, are apparently manufacturing the cigarettes, getting them to the consumer, providing the retailers with a decent handling fee, and still conniving with the few pennies left to ‘rip off’ the consumer? No doubt they are also threatening rival cigarette manufacturers with menaces, if they try to ‘butt’ into their market. Maybe they have hired a few ex-Inland Revenue bottom inspectors, for the task?
However, have I got news for you, oh wondrous denizens of the OFT. Do not dig too hard and kill your golden goose. If you do, it might become a bit too obvious why it is we do live in ‘rip off’ Britain. The people ripping everyone else off are the government, and all of its agents, including the over-salaried nose-pokers in the OFT. Take another flexi-day off, for pity’s sake. Just let the rest of us get on with our lives.
John Keegan has an excellent column in the Telegraph today on the legal problem of what to do with a deposed sovereign. One suspects that Mr. Keegan wrote this column months ago, in the sure knowledge that sooner or later it would become topical when Saddam was winkled out of his hole. The column provides a nice historical overview of “sovereign immunity.”
How to dispose of a fallen dictator is a problem of immense complexity for victor states. Dictators have been sovereigns, as Saddam was, de facto if not de jure. Sovereign states shrink from disposing peremptorily of sovereign rulers. The process, whichever is chosen, always threatens to set inconvenient precedents. Since 1648, when the Treaty of Westphalia created the principle that sovereign states, and therefore their sovereign heads, are both legally and morally absolute, there has been no legal basis for proceeding against such a person, however heinous the crimes he is known to have committed.
[Brief discussion of Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm, various Axis dictators, which should not be missed.]
None of these precedents seems likely to spare Saddam. He may, de facto, have been head of state but, by fleeing his capital and office at the outset of the last Gulf War, he effectively abandoned whatever constitutional status he enjoyed. The power vacuum he left has been filled by the creation of the Iraqi Governing Council, which, very conveniently last week, announced the establishment of a tribunal empowered to try any Iraqi citizen – and that Saddam unquestionably is – for crimes under domestic law. Prima facie, Saddam has to answer for many crimes, including murders he has himself committed, large-scale episodes of murder and torture of his fellow citizens, and organised extermination of minorities, particularly Kurds and Marsh Arabs, inside his own country.
I back into being a supporter of sovereignity, on the theory that a multitude of sovereign states limits the damage that any one of them can do, and that liberty arises in part from competition among dispersed authorities and powers. Solving the sovereign immunity problem by placing sovereign states under the jurisdiction of an overarching power seems to me to be a cure worse than the disease, because it creates a qui custodiet ipsos custodes problem, and because the supranational authority would be largely immune to democratic accountability. However, I see no reason why government officials should be immune from judicial accountability to their own citizens, which is precisely the solution that seems to be in the offing in Iraq.
On a bit of a tangent, Mr. Keegan makes the astonishing assertion at the end of the column that “at present there is no death penalty in Iraq. . . .” I would not dream of questioning the eminent Mr. Keegan on a point of fact such as this, but how can it possibly be true? I cannot believe that Saddam did not have the death penalty on the books (could all of those hundreds of thousands of executions have been extrajudicial?), and I cannot imagine that the Iraqi death penalty has been revoked in the last 6 months. Input from the commentariat would be appreciated – I sense a fine bit of obscure knowledge here, just out of reach, begging to be retailed to impressionable young things at cocktail parties.
Some cynical commenter I cannot remember who or where said that this weekend our naughty Labour government would choose now to bury some bad news which it would like out there but ignored. Sunday is a bad day for such trickery, but maybe there was something along these lines today.
However, my inclination is to suspect that the real Story That Just Got Buried, at any rate in Britain (Instapundit was all over it from the start, just before the Saddam Captured story broke, i.e just after he was actually captured), so far, is this, in the Sunday Telegraph yesterday. Okay, not buried exactly. The Sunday Telegraph is not buried. Shall we say: temporarily drowned out, by which I mean ignored, for the time being, by the British electronic media.
Anyway, buried or not, it is a huge story, if true:
A document discovered by Iraq’s interim government details a meeting between the man behind the September 11 attacks and Abu Nidal, the Palestinian terrorist, at his Baghdad training camp. Con Coughlin reports.
For anyone attempting to find evidence to justify the war in Iraq, the discovery of a document that directly links Mohammed Atta, the al-Qaeda mastermind of the September 11 attacks, with the Baghdad training camp of Abu Nidal, the infamous Palestinian terrorist, appears almost too good to be true.
So, ergo, it cannot be true. Right? Too good.
But what if it is true? I know, politicians – Tony Blair even – telling the truth, whatever next? But suppose, just suppose, that the Powers That Be have known all along and for absolute sure that Saddam and Al Qaeda were totally in bed with each other, but that they could not reveal how they knew because had they revealed their evidence that would have jeopardised, you know, ongoing operations, i.e. their source(s) close to Saddam? But could it be that this has now changed, what with SH now being safely in the bag? That makes the most sense of everything to me, not least the curious behaviour of our Prime Minister, apparently so willing to hang himself out to dry over this war, but actually sucking his critics into what a spin doctoral friend of mine calls a “killing ground”? “I told you to trust me. You should have.” I can hear it now.
I do not have time to comment at any more length as I am now off to an impromptu Samizdata social, but Melanie Phillips, to whom my thanks for reminding me that I had read this story yesterday and like her been very struck by it, does comment some more. So go read her.
Written in a rush. So apologies for misprints and/or contorted prose, which I reserve the right to clean up later.
If anything odd happens to the weather, they blame Global Warming and say that therefore it will get worse and that we are to blame. We Brought It On Ourselves. But it must be admitted that it, in this case, is rather startling:
BARCELONA, Spain — A Spanish-American scientific team will be scanning the United States this winter for what might be one of the weirdest byproducts of global warming: great balls of ice that fall from the sky.
The baffling phenomenon was first detected in Spain three years ago and has since been reported in a number of other countries, including the United States. So scientists now plan to monitor in a systematic way what they call “megacryometeors” — or great balls of ice that fall from the sky.
“I’m not worried that a block of ice may fall on your head,” said Dr. Jesus Martinez-Frias of the Center for Astrobiology in Madrid. “I’m worried that great blocks of ice are forming where they shouldn’t exist.”
Ice balls, which generally weigh 25 to 35 pounds but can be much bigger, have punched holes in the roofs of houses, smashed through car windshields, and whizzed right past people’s heads.
How very odd, as we say here. And as you constantly say if you are a regular reader of Dave Barry.
It’s tempting to start speculating where, and upon whom or what, we would most like one of these things to land.
More great news, this time on the Ozzy Osbourne front. He’s not going to die:
Rock star Ozzy Osbourne is breathing unaided for the first time since his quad bike accident a week ago.
The former Black Sabbath singer has been taken off a ventilator and has been able to speak to his family.
And with his old verbal fluency unimpaired, I trust.
Not long ago I caught Ozzy and daughter Kelly doing their Christmas single Changes on Top of the Pops, which is now number one in the hit parade apparently. And then immediately after that Ozzy had to be rushed to hospital following his prang, and Kelly rushes there to see him. You can’t buy publicity like that, because you can’t fake it.
This tune, for me, personifies the way that pop music these days, at least the sort of pop music you see on British telly, has become more and more something that your granny can recognise and sing along with. Not like it was in my day. In my day we used to drive elder brothers and sisters crazy, never mind our parents and grandparents. But now the man who used to bite the heads off bats is in that same celebrity category that used to be occupied by the Queen Mother and now also accommodates England’s rugby darling Jonny Wilkinson. (Although, it seems that many elder brother types are angry about Changes. This angry bloke reminds me of how my contemporaries at Essex University in the early seventies reacted to Donny Osmond.)
With his latest effort Ozzy has apparently set a new pop record, of the Guinness-Book-of variety:
The singer has set a new record for the longest time taken to reach number one during a career, reaching the top of the charts 33 years after his first hit with Black Sabbath, Paranoid, got to number four in August 1970.
Ah, Paranoid. Those were the days, eh? Who would have thought that Ozzy Osbourne of all people would live long enough to break a record like that?
Wonderful editorial in the Wall Street Journal today that spins out one of my favorite conceits – that there is no difference between the Mafia (the mob, la cosa nostra, call it what you will) and party politics. The details are very much American politics “inside-baseball”, but I have no doubt that a similar column could be written in England or elsewhere. A taste:
Al Gore’s grandly public endorsement of Howard Dean last week confirms my view that the easiest way to understand the Democratic Party today is by watching “The Godfather.”
I think of Bill Clinton as the Don Corleone of the Democratic Party. In the organization, there is no one above him. Terry McAuliffe is his Tom Hagen, who talks to the outside world. I leave it to others to fill out the rest of the cast.
It has been talked about among the cognoscenti for some weeks now that the new Dean organization, if he secured the nomination, would challenge the Clintons’ control of the party apparatus, meaning mainly the cash flow from contributors and the unions. But I thought it more likely that if Mr. Dean got the nomination, he would be visited over a table in a nice restaurant, the Palm in Washington, by Mr. McAuliffe and Harold Ickes, who would explain that he could win the presidency with them, but not without them.
With this understanding, an alliance of partners would result. The old organization and its traditional sources of income–the patronage mills, the government contracts, the public-bond issues, the legal jobs–would survive, and Mr. Dean’s people would be given significant control, maybe half. Now it’s not so clear that Howard Dean needs to cut a deal with the Clinton factions, because maybe the factions aren’t so close to the Clintons anymore.
I have long suspected that by far the most important aspect of the current Democratic primary is the internal struggle for control of the party that it is part of. Howard Dean has never liked the Clintons, who now control the party, and owes them nothing – he has his own internet-based grassroots and fundraising machinery. If he wins the nomination, he will become the new head of the Democratic Party, displacing the Clintons.
The Clintons have to oppose Dean because they don’t have any hooks in him – if you don’t understand this, you don’t understand power politics at all. The Clintons have always been the primary motivator behind the Stop Dean movement. They must maintain their control of the Democratic Party, or Hillary’s Presidential ambitions will come to naught. Wesley Clark, the quintessential Stop Dean candidate, is wholly a creation of the Clintons. The Clintons aren’t concerned that Dean will win the Presidency and prevent Hillary from running in 2008 (as the incumbent, Dean would be almost impossible for Hillary to challenge). They are concerned that Dean will win the nomination and control of the party, so that they will lose their only remaining fingerhold on influence, and the wealth and power it brings.
I regard the Clintons as a cancer on my country, and so, even though I think Howard Dean would make a dreadful President, I am all in favor of his winning the nomination.
According to an account from Major Bryan Reed, an operations officer for the US army’s 4th infantry division, in an exchange before he was pulled from the hole in the ground he was sheltering in, the former dictator said to US troops in English:
“My name is Saddam Hussein. I am the president of Iraq and I want to negotiate.” US special forces replied “regards from President Bush”.
The Government has been considering congestion charging based on road use. Under the scheme every car would have a tracking device attached. Satellite technology would then be used to track every car journey made. This personal information would be recorded centrally and drivers billed for their road use.
The privacy implications are obvious and frightening.
It seems that in the wake of Big Blunkett’s ID Card announcement privacy concerns are now irrelevant. Transport Secretary Alistair Darling is to push ahead with the plan. Darling has appointed Professor David Begg to head a committee to consider the practicalities.
Begg said:
“It is now a matter of when, not if. Six months ago it was on the shelf, but Mr Darling is now very serious about it.”
BBC Report here
Cross-posted from The Chestnut Tree Cafe
The cost of gathering information determines the size of organizations.
– Ronald Coase, quoted by Everett Ehrlich in
yesterday’s Washington Post
Someone should check carefully.
 
One of these men is the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams.
Just so as to confirm that no mistake has been made the Americans should ask their captive whether terrorists can ever have ‘serious moral goals’.
I’ve spent nearly the entire evening watching the news. BBC1 and ITV4 in particular had a great deal of coverage of the event here. It is of course about politics according to the BBC Washington correspondents… as if Dean ever had a prayer of a snowflake chance in hell of winning next fall.
Ken Adelman gave two marvelous remote screen debate performances within an hour and on both channels. Jon Snow was at a loss for words when he said to Adelman: “Of course you will be for that (Saddam’s execution)” And Ken had him off balance simply by retorting, “Why do you assume that?”
But the biggest laughs I had this evening were the constant use of the Q word. On BBC1 there were two different reporters using it within minutes of each other.
Hey, the BBC lads in Iraq have to invent some silver lining in all this!
Times has an article up that contains notes from Saddam in custody. Many bloggers and their readers have been wondering what Saddam will reveal in interrogations. The first questioning has not produced much it seems, the transcript was full of “Saddam rhetoric type stuff,” according to the official who paraphrased Saddam’s answers to some of the questions.
When asked “How are you?” said the official, Saddam responded, “I am sad because my people are in bondage.” When offered a glass of water by his interrogators, Saddam replied, “If I drink water I will have to go to the bathroom and how can I use the bathroom when my people are in bondage?”
More importantly, Saddam is denying everything and replying with really dumb answers to questions that might incriminate him.
Saddam was also asked whether Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. “No, of course not,” he replied, according to the official, “the U.S. dreamed them up itself to have a reason to go to war with us.” The interrogator continued along this line, said the official, asking: “if you had no weapons of mass destruction then why not let the U.N. inspectors into your facilities?” Saddam’s reply: “We didn’t want them to go into the presidential areas and intrude on our privacy.”
Hm, Saddam as a champion of privacy?
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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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