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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Interesting story out of Oregon on their state health insurance scheme. Much to the relief of Oregon taxpayers, no doubt, some 40,000 people have dropped out of the Oregon Health Plan program, which provides state-subsidized health insurance.
The reason they dropped out? I don’t know, really, but it is interesting that the newspaper casts the story entirely in terms of the poor folk being dropped from the program. I say the participants dropped out because they apparently chose not to pay the premiums, which are as low as $6.00 per month. The response of “advocates” for the poor is just priceless.
Advocates for the poor say the premiums are too expensive for some people and the government may have overestimated the ability of people to mail a check.
“It’s an enormous barrier,” said Ellen Pinney, director of the Oregon Health Action Committee. “Let alone the $6, there is the whole issue of writing a check or getting a money order, putting it in an envelope with a stamp and putting it in the mail to this place in Portland that must receive it by the due date.”
$6.00 a month too expensive? Give me a break. This sounds to me like a classic example of “I can’t afford it” as code for “I have other things I would rather spend the money on.” If you forego a single trip per month to McDonald’s, you will save enough to pay a $6.00 monthly premium.
Really, though, the notion that poor people are incapable of mailing a check has got to be the last word in condescension and infantilization. Believe me, anyone who can fill out the paperwork to qualify for Medicaid or other state-paid health insurance (or find someone to do it for them) is capable of writing a check or getting a money order and putting it in the mail.
I’m not sure what larger point this story illustrates, to tell you the truth. Perhaps the corrosive effect of the welfare state on its recipients. Perhaps that, if you support the welfare state, sooner or later you will start to sound like a total ninny.
Thanks to OpinionJournal for the link.
Mr Duncan Smith has become famous at last. He has also managed to get 45 per cent in a confidence vote. To British readers, used to three way elections where such a score would guarantee a big majority in the House of Commons, IDS seems to have done well. But in a two way contest, especially as the incumbent, it’s not so good.
I recall that François Mitterand had the nickname "Monsieur 45 pour cent" because he could never break that barrier in French presidential election contests from the 1960s until 1981. For my part, I really thought that Mr Duncan Smith would be a lot more capable than he in fact turned out to be.
Lucky Tony Blair. Unlucky Gordon Brown.
I’ve just read an article in Fox News which has left me both speechless and in a fury:
A 14-year-old New Jersey schoolboy — whose dad and stepdad are in the military — was suspended for five days because he drew a “patriotic” stick figure of a U.S Marine blowing away a Taliban fighter, officials said yesterday.
It further notes:
Scott Switzer, of Colts Neck, was sent home last week from Tinton Falls Middle School after a teacher saw the image on a computer and described it to the principal.
Scott, who turned 14 Tuesday and was headed back to school Wednesday, said he was unjustly disciplined for his sketch of “a war scene.”
This sort of treatment of a young lad for simply being a young lad is incredibly destructive. You can’t repress the natural expression of, well, being a boy. Boys like imaginary wars and fighting battles in the back yard, climbing trees, hiding under porches, jumping off porch roofs and playing ‘paratrooper’ by swinging as high as they can before letting go. You can’t stop them from going bang-bang at passing cars – transmogrified by imagination into Russian or Nazi or Jap or Iraqi tanks, depending on the generation.
If you were to succeed, you would destroy them as thoroughly as if you’d taken them in a backroom and buggered their wee bottoms. Worse, actually. One can recover from mere physical abuse… rape of the soul is forever.
I used to draw all sorts of battle scenes when I was 14. Lots of aircraft diving and strafing, even an imaginary Nazi Spaceship after reading Robert Heinlein’s “Rocketship Galileo”. I’m sure these morons would have loved me.
At one point we had a long running series of water gun ‘assassinations’ in the halls of Coraopolis Senior High School. One group of us were the “Nazi’s” and another were “Codename Jericho” and “Operation Bluelight” from the TV series of the time. This included secret coded messages being passed around and sometimes captured and passed on to me as the senior Herr codebreaker. I’d just gotten my first book on Codes and Ciphers through the Scholastic Book Service. Since both ‘sides’ were working from the same book, it was fairly easy to crack them!
We finally caught a ‘double agent’ and surrounded him in the basketball court bleachers during some ceremony in which a Pennsylvania State official presented our school a State flag. When it ended, our target tried to run for it, but we surrounded him. The ‘we’ being all of us zombies who’d already been watergunned over the last few weeks. The rules were that those already ‘dead’ weren’t allowed to take out anyone else.
Our designated assassin then emptied the watergun on him.
These politically correct fruitcakes in New Jersey would simply have adored us. They would probably have sent me and the others in for Indoctrination and Re-education.
In an hour from now, we will know if Iain Duncan Smith has survived as leader of the Tory Party…
…or more accuratly, some of you will know, because I have just noticed that there is going to be a fascinating wildlife documentary about the mating habits of the Northumbrian Lesser Spotted Leaping Tree Vole on one of the documentary cable channels.
Update: 
Ruth Lea, the head of policy at Britain’s Institute of Directors (IoD), has been fired. What a pity. Lea put forward views that truly took account of the needs of business, even though the government did not like them.
On an unrelated point, I wonder if George Cox, the IoD’s Director General, is now in line for a knighthood?
I just had a long series of crackles on my speakers in time to the flickering of the overhead lights. One of the others in the flat noticed problems with his radio this morning. These all could be signs of the incoming solar storm. It is one of the three largest since records have been kept on such things. The last really big one, in 1989, took down a big chunk of the Canadian power grid.
If it hits us just right, there could be spectacular aurorae tonight. It is worth going outside tonight and looking up, just in case. There may be nothing or there may be one of the more spectacular heavenly sights you have ever seen. There is just no telling.
At the moment my upward view is rather grey and the outdoors is cold, damp and rather miserable. I doubt I will have the pleasure of seeing this natural lightshow unless the weather changes drastically.
Disturbing news in the Telegraph about the European Union taking its first step last week towards the creation of an EU-wide health identity card able to store a range of biometric and personal data on a microchip by 2008. Approved by Union ministers in Luxembourg, the plastic disk will slide into the credit-card pouch of a wallet or purse.
The European Health Insurance Card is intended to end the bureaucratic misery of E111 forms currently used by travellers who fall ill in other EU countries. Eventually it will replace a plethora of other complex forms needed for longer stays.
But civil liberties groups said it was the start of a scheme for a harmonised data chip that would quickly evolve into an EU “identity card” containing intrusive information off all kinds that could be read by a computer.
The European Commission confirmed that the final phase in 2008 would add a “smart chip” containing a range of data, including health files and records of treatment received.
The ultimate objective is to have an electronic chip on the card, as the technology improves.
Tony Bunyan, the head of Statewatch, said it was part of a disturbing Union-wide erosion of privacy since September 11 2001.
We all know where they’re heading with this. They want a single card with all our data on one chip. It’ll be a passport and driver’s licence rolled into one with everything from our national insurance numbers, bank accounts, to health records.
Yeah, I think he just might be on to something…
The Telegraph has an article about a roadside watch by local volunteers under fire.
Volunteers from villages, known as “speed watchers”, will use the devices at the roadside to identify speeding motorists before passing the information to the police. A senior police officer said the three-month pilot scheme at Milton of Campsie, near Glasgow, was a “local solution to a local problem”.
But motoring organisations, civil liberties groups and lawyers have criticised the idea on the grounds that there could be difficulties in providing acceptable evidence in court and that the system could be abused by people involved in disputes.
Well, it is a busybodies’ license to interefere further in people’s lives. When someone with attitudes such as Patrick Friel, the first person to be offered a speed camera, volunteers to ‘police local community’, I know the police are pandering to those with worst social instincts.
Everyone I’ve spoken to supports the use of the camera because something has to be done about speeding drivers.
Yes, and the way to do this is to help government impose more constraints on our daily lives.
Everyone knows the Fisher Space Pen was a valuable spin-off from the early space program. NASA funded them to invent a pressurized ink source so Astronauts could write while hanging about ‘upside-down’ in microgravity. It has become well known folklore. The trouble is, like much other folklore, it isn’t true. ESA’s Pedro Duque took a normal pen with him on his space station visit and tried it:
Duque has discovered that “ordinary” pens work just fine in space and that the famous American versions that use a pressurized ink source may be a little overkill. In commenting on the ball point pen, he (unintentionally?) makes an interesting observation about the U.S. space program:
“Sometimes being too cautious keeps you from trying, and therefore things are built more complex than necessary,” Duque writes.
You will not find many naysayers to this observation in the space community. NASA is synonymous with gold-plated and overbuilt. They have long had a philosophy to never use a 10 cent screw from the local hardware store when they can let a research project for a million dollars into a key congressional district.
The State is not your friend. NASA will never get you and I off this planet.
You can read some of his daily diary entries here.
The Telegraph reports that a police force is recruiting driving instructors, milkmen and delivery drivers to be its “eyes and ears” on the streets in response to criticism over lack of visible policing.
West Midlands police said that as “trouble spotters”, they will be urged to report crimes and traffic accidents, and will be issued with clipboards and asked to write down any activity they believe needs investigating.
Rising crime and paperwork for officers has meant that beat officers and roving patrol cars are seldom seen.
Twenty instructors have already joined the pilot scheme in Halesowen, which will be expanded across the force.
Scaled Composites SpaceShipOne was dropped from the mothership at 46000 feet for its fourth glide flight on October 17th, after undergoing minor aerodynamic alterations to correct problems discovered during the third flight on September 23rd. The turn around was faster than I’d expected. As they are now testing the preliminaries to engine ignition, I expect the first in-air engine startup will happen within the next few flights.
According to Scaled Composites, the flight objectives were:
Fourth glide flight of SpaceShipOne. Primary purpose was to examine the effects of horizontal tail modifications at both forward and mid-range CG locations (obtained by dumping water from an aft ballast tank between test points). The tail modifications included a fixed strake bonded to the tail boom in front of the stabilator and a span-wise flow fence mounted on the leading edge of each stab at mid-span. (See the write up under the SPACESHIPONE GROUND TEST section that describes our Ford-250 wind tunnel which was used to help derive the current flight configuration). Other test objectives included a functional check of the rocket motor controller, ARM, FIRE and safing switches as well as the oxidizer dump valve. Additional planned maneuvers included full rudder pedal sideslips and more aggressive nose pointing while in the feathered configuration.
The results were quite good:
Launch conditions were 46,200 feet and 115 knots and produced a clean separation. The tail performance was examined by flying “longitudinal stability” points between stall and 130 knots and showed considerable improvement of the airfoil’s lift coefficient as well as its post stall characteristics. No vehicle pitch up tendency was noted as the main wing now stalls first. Real time video of the tufted tails fed back down to mission control helped considerably in assessing the performance of these aerodynamic improvements. More aggressive maneuvering in the feather made it evident that the pilot could readily point the vehicle’s nose where desired and all rocket motor functionality tests were satisfactory.
I expect a drop test and powered flight to occur by the Wright Brothers first flight anniversary date in mid-December. A full suborbital attempt is possible but would be pushing the envelope rather hard. How hard is impossible for anyone on the outside to estimate.
It would be a lovely Christmas present for all of us spacers though…
Herewith inaugurating a look at the “Annals of Bureaucracy”, a sad tale, via our friends at Hit & Run, of the government school bureaucracy in action.
Applications and letters of interest from idealistic teachers continue to pour into inner-city school systems across the country, and many candidates, like Cochran, are being ignored or contacted much too late to do any good, according to an unusually detailed study by the nonprofit New Teacher Project.
A new report on the study, “Missed Opportunities: How We Keep High-Quality Teachers Out of Urban Schools,” concludes that those school systems alienate many talented applicants because of rules that protect teachers already on staff and because of slow-moving bureaucracies and budgeting delays.
“As a result, urban districts lose the very candidates they need in their classrooms . . . and millions of disadvantaged students in America’s cities pay the price with lower-quality teachers than their suburban peers,” wrote researchers Jessica Levin and Meredith Quinn, who were given rare access to the inner workings of school districts in four U.S. cities.
It was standard procedure to let impressive applications sit in file drawers for months, the researchers found, while the candidates, needing to get their lives in order, secured work elsewhere. One district, for example, received 4,000 applications for 200 slots but was slow to offer jobs and lost out on top candidates.
It goes on and on, enumerating the ways unions, administrators, and legislators all contribute to a system that seems designed to insure that the best teachers do not get anywhere near the neediest kids.
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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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