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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Government property

· Civil liberty, Law & Regulation · Self ownership · UK affairs

A question for all those people who support the introduction of a national ID card scheme.

Cattle get tagged.

And slaves get branded.

Which one are you?

November 12th, 2003 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)

Toot for the NHS

· Health & medical

I was lying on a piece of blue tissue roll in one of Tony Blair’s world-class Accident and Emergency hospital departments, a few weeks ago, at around 3am on a Sunday morning. As you do, in such a situation, I was thinking about death, and Simon & Garfunkel albums. But being one who recently qualified as an NLP practitioner, under the tutelage of Californian shaman Richard Bandler, I thought to myself how can I turn this around into a positive experience? How can I come out the other side of this seemingly grim situation mentally refreshed rather than mentally battered? So I made a deal with myself. If I make it out the other side of this alive, I stipulated, I’ll turn the entire experience into a piece for Samizdata. You see, some of us mad-eyed libertarians really do care.

So I was going to bend your ears with a Theodore Dalrymple-style diatribe on the drunken street scum of Berkshire, around me, demanding to be allowed to smoke, and arguing with stoic nurses while dripping with blood from self-induced beer-night injuries. I was also going to mention, in passing, the unpleasant tone of the queue managers, the uncomfortable beds, and the reasons why I was waiting to be seen, after a MASH-style nurse triage, rather than why there wasn’t already a swarm of surgeons all over me instantly administering reassurance, sympathy, and curative scalpel blades. But then I thought, come on Andrew, stop being such a Victor Meldrew prima donna. You’re still breathing, you sad git.

You’ve got a problem, of that there was no doubt, but at least the nurse had seen me, and had determined that a glorious English sunrise would see my smiling face for at least one more happy time before Death sent Mort along to claim his latest victim. The scum of Berkshire may have been regretting picking fights with broken bottles, and the bed may have been uncomfortable, but the surgeon would be along in a minute, right after seeing that screaming baby that had just come in after me. Maybe I wasn’t in the best hospital in the world, and maybe the NHS is crawling with MRSA, and maybe I had been made to shout my medical predicament to the receptionist, behind her plexi-glass shield, so that the fifty other people waiting could hear every detail, but at least I was in the best hospital in the nearest 100 miles, and I would have refused to swap my current position, lying on this blue paper roll, with anything other than instantaneous transportation to Dr McCoy’s sick bay on the starship, Enterprise. → Continue reading: Toot for the NHS

November 12th, 2003 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)

Mass debating in Paris

· European affairs · Sui generis

Brave, crusading, iconoclastic Guardian correspondent Matthew Tempest is striking out against the evil, right-wing, corporate-media conspiracy that is actively suppressing the truth:

It’s an unthinking, immutable truth for the mainstream media that young people are not interested in politics.

So, if they were permitted to read about it, many of that media’s consumers/readers would be surprised to learn that today something like 60,000 mostly twentysomething people from all over Europe will gather in Paris, unpaid, in their own time…

No-one is permitted to read about this. It is unclean. It is seditious. It is dangerous propoganda and, I swear, if you even cast your eyes over so much as a single sentence of it, your door will be knocked down and you will be dragged away by the jackbooted goons of the Bushista-Berlusconi-Murdoch Mind-Control Reich and subjected to continuous loops of Fox News until your eyeballs explode.

…to sit through four days, 10 hours a day, of..

Nose-picking, navel-gazing and self-abuse.

…lectures, seminars and talks on politics.

Same thing.

And it’s not just any old politics. The topics are largely esoteric, complex and abstract…

Translation:a load of incontinent, incomprehensible drivel.

Until today, the ESF had almost no coverage in the mainstream British media.

Well, what do you expect? Nobody dare speak of such things, lest they be ‘eliminated’ by the all-seeing, all-knowing, omnipotent Zionist-Corporate-Illuminati World Control Machine.

The event is the European Social Forum…

No kidding?!! → Continue reading: Mass debating in Paris

November 12th, 2003 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)

The Times, they are a changin’

· Independent sites & social media

With apologies to Bob Dylan… A welcome new addition to the blogopshere is David Smith, the economics editor for The Sunday Times. More and more well known journalists are seeing blogging as a useful adjunct to their work. Blogging is here to stay, ladies and gents.

David’s latest blog article is entitled How high is the next peak in base rates?… and he started off with an article with somewhat broader appeal called George Bush’s scorched-earth economics policy. The EconomicsUK Blog promises to be a regular stop for economists, policy wonks and politicos!

Welcome to the blogosphere, David!

bb_davidsmith.gif

November 12th, 2003 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)

Compulsory ID cards by back door

· Identity Cards

Some numbers surrounding the issue of identity cards from Telegraph:

From 2007, people renewing passports would be issued with an ID card and would have to pay £77 at current prices. At present, passports cost £42.

Identity cards may also be combined with driving licences at a cost of £73 instead of £38.

The cards on their own would cost £35, but 16-year-olds would receive them free. The elderly and people on low incomes would pay £10.

The charge would cover the cost of biometric identifiers, such as iris prints, fingerprints or facial recognition, taken from everyone wanting to travel abroad or to drive.

More than 40 million Britons have a passport and about 35 million hold a driving licence. As each comes up for renewal the personal details would be entered on a national identity register and the new document combined with an ID card.

The £3 billion scheme would also cover 4.5 million foreign nationals resident in Britain.

Once about 80 per cent of the population has the cards, a decision would be taken making it compulsory to produce the document to access public services such as the NHS, or to get a job or claim benefits.

November 12th, 2003 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)

Whatever the question, ID cards aren’t the answer

· Identity Cards

The Telegraph’s leading editorial is about ID cards. It sums up David Blunkett’s ‘sneaky’ strategy to force them onto the British populace.

So David Blunkett has come up with an ingenious compromise. He proposes to introduce an elaborate ID card scheme, but without making it compulsory in the first phase. A National Identity Register will record biometric details of the population. Thousands of machines will be installed to read the new ID cards, paid for by employers, the NHS and whoever else wants them. Individuals will also have to pay when they apply for new passports or driving licences. Mr Blunkett apparently hopes that people will hardly notice the £3 billion cost, at least as long as the scheme remains voluntary and is phased in over a decade or more.

What is the point of inserting a “draft Bill” into the Queen’s Speech? What is the point of an ID card that is not compulsory? If America and the European Union are requiring biometric passports, what is the point of confusing that technical problem with the highly political issue of ID cards? Why should a government that has hitherto ignored civil liberties now respect them in the case of ID cards?

Quite.

November 12th, 2003 | Comments are closed

The tyranny of the majority

· UK affairs

The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) has announced that it will be pressing for a ban on using technological techniques to allow parents to choose the gender of their children. The Telegraph reports:

The British public has firmly rejected the idea of couples being allowed to choose the sex of their babies for purely social reasons. The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) will announce today that it is recommending a ban on social sex selection to the Government following a year-long consultation and an independent Mori poll.

[…]

Prof Baldwin also said the view that selection might “upset the balance of sexes” was not a powerful reason for preventing sex selection in this country and that few people were interested in selecting the sex of their babies. The recommendations were welcomed yesterday. Prof Alison Murdoch, chairman of the British Fertility Society, said: “We think that it is important that this technique is regulated, and that the regulations take into account the real concerns of the public at large.”

[…]

Dr Michael Wilks, chairman of the ethics committee of the British Medical Association, said: “Sex selection purely for social reasons is unacceptable.”

So what we are being told is that the main reason for banning this technique is that it is distasteful to the majority of British people. Not that it is inherently bad, just that it is unpopular. This is enough for millions of people and all of government to justify the threat of violence against anyone who dares to try and order their private lives a certain way.

As a result, I am wondering why when someone says something else about another widely unpopular and abominated practice, far from the Tribunes of the People leaping to book legislative time in Parliament to pass more laws, they are investigating the speaker of these words for possible criminal prosecution. Speak out against homosexuality, even though only the most purblind would claim the majority of people do not find homosexual practices really distasteful, and you will find yourself up in front of the Beak with some explaining to do. Why not just give the force of coercive law to what ‘The British Public’ think about that too? Why not lend the hammer of state to every prejudice that is widely held by ‘the people’?

Next time you hear George Monbiot or Peter Hain talking about making society more democratic, I suggest you take the time to figure out what that really means.

November 12th, 2003 | 35 comments - (Comments are closed)

Too old to rock and roll, too young to die

· Arts & Entertainment

Music is a very subjective thing and so it is hard to say something is ‘good’ music without adding what that really means is that it is good for me. I had assumed for quite some years that the fact I regarded almost all the popular music I heard on the radio or TV as dismal crap was more indicative that I had reached a certain age where I was just perminently out of phase with younger tastes, rather than some sudden collective inability of the modern pop music industry to be creative… No, it had to be me. Maybe 10 years ago there was a narrow tributary off the seething mainstream that I could swim in musically, but that was clearly no longer the case.

Well, maybe not. Whilst wandering past the Virgin Megastore on the King’s Road in Chelsea yesterday I heard what sounded like a rather danceable bit of vaguely sinister pop/darkwave/electronica that sucked me into the shop irresistibly.

Upon asking at the desk what was being played, I was surprised to discover it was a track called Vertigo (extended mix), which is a remix of bubblegum popstress par excellence Holly Valance‘s latest song ‘State of Mind’ on a CD EP single. It sounds like Siouxsie & The Banshees (think ‘cities in dust’) being morphed with Kylie at her most virally and annoyingly catchy… yeah, yeah, I know… hard to imagine. I bought the extended play CD single and slunk out into the street worrying about the state of my ‘cred’… and have been unable to stop playing it since.

Anyway, I guess it is nice to know that, circa 2003, a teen singer in a tiny skirt can front something that brings a pleasing snarl even to the lips of a doomed and jaded old geezer such as myself… plus I rather liked the delightfully arrogant and essentially meaningless video for ‘State of Mind’ on the CD. Ah the joys of Western civilisation.

Holly does darkwave, sort of... and suprisingly well

Holly does darkwave, sort of… and surprisingly well

November 12th, 2003 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)

“Like your knickers – too bad you’re so poor …”

· Privacy

More RFID coverage in the Chicago Sun-Times:

RFID chips could make your daily life easier, but they also could let anyone with a scanning device know what kind of underwear you have on and how much money is in your wallet

But these same super-small computer chips might also, for the convenience of retailers, be tucked into every shirt you wear, every book you buy and even every dollar bill you put in your wallet – and that could inadvertently create a profound threat to your personal privacy. A clever snoop, armed with a scanner that can read the radio signals coming from the microchips, could size you up in an instant while just strolling past you on the street.

Spooky. (Actually it sounds rather fun. Sorry. Sorry.)

November 12th, 2003 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)

FAA accepts XCOR submission

· Aerospace & Astronautics

Congrats to Jeff and the gang at XCOR for being first over the regulatory bar.

I would write more but I am up to my ears in work, so just read the article.

November 11th, 2003 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)

The Beeb mafia

· UK affairs

The news today seem to be full of ‘juicy goodness’. And yes, that is sarcasm. Not only ID cards loom on the horizon at a £40 pound a pop, hold the civil liberties, but another ‘venerable’ British instutition, the BBC is attacking your wallet. Next April, the TV license that finances the BBC is to increase to £121 ($194) a year.

Ms Jowell has already insisted the BBC’s core public service output would be protected for at least 10 to 15 years.

This settlement is designed to enable the BBC to provide a strong and distinctive schedule of high quality programmes and remain at the forefront of broadcasting technology.

Or perhaps help them pay for more ‘coverage policemen’ to monitor their bias.

November 11th, 2003 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)

Kylie is shocked, shocked!

· Arts & Entertainment

Australian pop singer and possessor of one of the world’s finest rear ends, Kylie Minogue, says she is shocked and aghast at the amount of sex in today’s pop culture.

I am rather partial to the Aussie songstress, so I won’t be cruel but, bejeesus, on what planet has the lovely lass been residing these past few years? A convent? Ever since the days of Jazz, Blues and the rest, sex and All That has been central to pop music. That is why the ‘moral’ scolds are always against it.

Oh well, next we will be hearing from the Pope on how he is shocked at how Christianity has got too much stuff about miracles and Jesus in it. Or how there is too much contemplating of violence in the armed forces.

Kylie likes to relax whilst discussing cultural issues

Kylie strikes a demure pose to discourse on sex, of all things!

November 11th, 2003 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
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