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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There may be a sub-text or an agenda here (and it is the Guardian after all) but I am loss to readily identify one. Hence, it is hard to judge just how much credence to give a story like this. In its favour, it is consistent with other news emanating from China:
According to government officials, the amount of economic activity in China soared to RMB7.9 trillion (£570bn) in the first nine months of the year, putting China on course to achieve a growth rate of 8.5% for 2003 – the fastest in more than five years.
If the country can maintain this pace it will overtake Britain and France to become the world’s fourth biggest economy well before the end of 2005.
Chinese government officials? The Guardian? Oooh, my ‘Source-Warning’ indicator is blinking furiously. Still, it would not and should not be surprising that a country which has ditched socialism should outperform two countries that are still wedded to it.
I think this is a fascinating site, specialising in before-and-after plastic surgery star photos, which I found via one of my regular favourites, b3ta.com. “Crap plastic surgery”, they call it, but I say that there’s a bit more to all this than just the chance to jeer at silly celebs with fat lips and boobs that go in an out from one year to the next. As always, where the celebs go now, millions more will follow.
One of my absolute favourites, Meg Ryan, as is pointed out at the site itself, has been made to look like Susan Dey (of LA Law fame). I adore both these ladies, but even so, what Ryan has done to herself is to me off-putting. She’s just not Meg Ryan any more, which I suppose it the whole idea. Presumably Meg Ryan was fed-up with making dark, serious, scary, explosive movies, packed with implausible action and profound human wickedness, and everyone saying “We preferred you in When Harry Met Sally“, so she decided to smash up her original face and change herself into something else.
When I first saw the MR “trout pout” on the cover of a trashy made-up-news-mag, I thought, ugh!! But maybe the magazines had photoshop-enhanced it. According to this it’s not too bad.
However, according to this, she’s turned herself into Molly Ringwald.
What Britain’s TV equivalent of Meg Ryan, Leslie Ash, has had done to herself is, however, truly scary. Google google. See what I mean.
What makes the Ryan and Ash lipo-enhancements so unnerving is that we’ve got used to these ladies with their regular faces. So when you see them now, you can’t forget that that isn’t the real shape of their faces and they’ve got bits of their bums in there. That’s not good.
And would you believe: Al Pacino? He seems to have said: “Make me look more like Dustin Hoffman!”
On the face of it this is all down-market tittle-tattle of the trailer-trashiest sort, of interest to the kind of lunatics who (like me) enjoy all the mad rubbish that b3ta links to, but to nobody else. But as so often with b3ta there’s deadly serious stuff in among the photoshopped squirrels with eagle-heads and pictures of weird people with huge eyes for no reason. It’s clear that something very profound is going on with our culture here. We have entered the age of the artificial body.
What’s going on? It starts with the obvious, which is that people who now want to change their bodies now can change their bodies.
It reminds me a bit of what Alice Bachini was blogging about yesterday, which got a lot of admiring attention. That posting was about a person changing their entire voice and become a different person, without necessarily meaning to. With plastic surgery, you change your entire look, and become a different person while very much meaning to, in much the same way that Meg Ryan seems to want to be a different sort of actress.
The strangest transformation of all which I found at Awful Plastic Surgery is that the charming Marie Osmond has had herself re-engineered into the monstrous Ruby Wax. Why would anyone want to make that transition? The answer is probably: she didn’t. Plastic surgery is still only a bet that it will turn out better than before rather than worse. (Ask Leslie Ash!) But already it’s a bet that millions are placing.
Personally I think it is all most undignified, like changing your name because you don’t like the one you’ve got.
The Guardian reports that the Conservatives have drawn up detailed plans to defeat some of the worst parts of Big Blunkett’s discredited Criminal “Justice” Bill.
In particular the Tory peers plan to prevent Blunkett from removing the right to trial by jury in certain cases and allowing gossip to be accepted as evidence.
Since the government doesn’t have an automatic majority in the Lords they will have to compromise, risk losing the entire Bill or invoke the rarely used Parliament Act.
Cross-posted from The Chestnut Tree Cafe
Glenn Reynolds pointed out an interesting discussion over at Heretical Ideas: are Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics moral?
I started off writing a comment of my own but it rapidly grew to the point at which it really ‘wanted’ to be a Samizdata article in its own right. I feel I have some standing to speak on this topic because I actually have the creds. In short, Dr. Herbert Simon, the father of AI, was my grad school mentor and I’ve worked for the CMU Robotics Institute as a member of the research staff.
→ Continue reading: I, Puma Arm
Courtesy of one of the great Middle Men of the Internet, Dave Barry, comes this gripping story:
Bordeaux, France – A French magistrate caught masturbating during a court session was locked up on Thursday and put under investigation, justice officials in the south-western city of Bordeaux said.
The head judge of the city’s appeals court said “a penal inquiry ordered by the prosecutor of the republic is currently being carried out by the police” while a request for a psychiatric evaluation of the magistrate, who was not named, had been made.
He said the justice ministry had also been asked to temporarily suspend the magistrate while the matter was looked into.
According to La Charente Libre, a local newspaper who had a reporter in court at the time of the alleged offence, the magistrate had discreetly lifted up his ceremonial robe while a lawyer was presenting final arguments, undid his pants and “engaged in gestures that left nothing to the imagination”. Sapa-AFP
Which, said a later commenter chez Barry, is how justice gets to be blind.
Each passing day seems to herald a further deterioration in the state of the British Conservative Party. [From the UK Times]
THE Conservatives have had to raise £4 million in emergency loans to keep the party afloat until the end of the year after suffering a huge drop in income from wealthy donors.
Many of its biggest benefactors are understood to have become disillusioned with the party’s direction under Iain Duncan Smith, while others are dismayed by the feuding over the leadership.
So, they are languishing in the opinion polls, their leader is seen as ineffective by most of his own Party and most of the public; he is also under a Parliamentary investigation for alleged impropriety; the Party is shot through with factional in-fighting and now their financial backers are beginning to walk away from them.
If the entire Party succumbed to an outbreak of leprosy it could hardly make matters any worse.
Internet.com reports that UK retailer Marks and Spencer (M&S) is to begin trials of RFID tagging at item level.
Clothes in M&S stores will be tagged with RFID chips. These each contain a unique ID and can be read by a nearby scanner without the consumer being aware of it. Thus your underwear might be broadcasting your location.
To be fair to M&S they did show an unusual degree of social responsibility concerning these trials. They consulted with CASPIAN and as a result the tags will be obvious and will not be scanned at checkouts.
Welcome as these factors are, this trial is still another step on the dangerous road towards making RFID ubiquitous. Not all companies will share M&S’s ethical stance, therefore RFID tagging at item level must be opposed outright.
Cross-posted from The Chestnut Tree Cafe. Thanks to shanti941 for the pointer.
Great story posted at the Volokh Conspiracy:
Ron Simpson knows guns — and instantly knew the one in front of him Wednesday night was a phony.
Sure, the gun in the hands of the would-be robber at Action Video at 1058 Alamance Church Road had the look of a 9 mm, but Simpson, the manager, said he was “95 percent sure” the muzzle was too small to project a bullet.
“That is not a real gun,” Simpson told the robber. “This is a real gun,” he said, pulling a .25-caliber derringer from his front-right jeans pocket. . . .
Simpson picked up a cordless phone, dialed 911 and followed the robber outside. The fearful criminal stayed about a minute and ran before police arrived. . . .
Reminds me of that scene in Crocodile Dundee when the eponymous hero is confronted by a street punk with a switchblade.
This particular article on the oral argument before the US Supreme Court concerning search and siezure doctrine doesn’t really have any looming significance for the future of planetary liberty. I mostly thought it was well-written and funny, and gives some insight into the “sausage factory” of the common law.
First, the set-up:
The Fourth Amendment bars the state from unreasonable searches and seizures. One of the things that makes a search constitutionally “reasonable” is the presence of a warrant. Another is an old common-law requirement: the so-called knock-and-announce rule. The rule is codified in 18 USC § 3109, which provides that in executing a search warrant, “an officer may break open any outer or inner door or window of a house, or any part of a house … if, after notice of his authority and purpose, he is refused admittance.” In cases of likely destruction of the evidence, or danger to life, the cops are free to bash first and knock later.
An insight into the fundamental problem with the appellate courts in the US:
Stevens is still hung up on the statute. The statute requires “refusal” to admit the cops. Silence is not refusal, he says. Salmons replies, “That is the way the statute is worded. But this court has never construed the statute to be read literally.”
Hold the phone.
This is a court that is rabid about construing statutes literally. This is a court that would read Dada poetry literally. They are strangely satisfied with this answer.
Actually, the Supreme Court, like almost any court, only reads statutes literally when that will get them where they want to go. When the words on the page of the governing authority, whether a statute or the Constitution, are inconvenient, well, then we get a lot of blather about “living documents” or “legislative intent” or whatever, until the courts feel we have been lulled into not noticing they are about to say that the governing authority says something which it clearly does not say.
Anyhow, read the article mostly for the wit and the bathroom humor. What’s that, you say? Bathroom humor at the Supreme Court of the United States?
You bet. Read the whole thing, and find out.
John Walker thinks that big brother and big media can put the Internet genie back in the bottle.
Earlier I believed there was no way to put the Internet genie back into the bottle. In this document I will provide a road map of precisely how I believe that could be done, potentially setting the stage for an authoritarian political and intellectual dark age global in scope and self-perpetuating, a disempowerment of the individual which extinguishes the very innovation and diversity of thought which have brought down so many tyrannies in the past.
This is a massive document that is highly technical in some places, but is well worth slogging your way through. (And I always did wonder why IPv6 flopped.)
(Hat-tip to Joe Katzman)
Last week I linked from White Rose to this piece by Jemima Lewis in the Telegraph, because it contained some stuff of White Rose relevance about using technology to enable parents to keep track of their kids.
But, as commenter Mark Ellott pointed out there, this Telegraph piece also contained some interesting reflections on the teaching of history, provoked by the increasing annoyance being expressed by Germans about Britain’s continuing obsession with the history of Nazism to the exclusion of any other sort of history.
Our Education Minister, the big-eared Mr Clarke, has been using his big ears to listen to his German opposite number Edelgard Buhlman, tell him that:
… our fixation with Hitler is leaving British teenagers with a distorted view of German history, and a violent prejudice against the Teutonic race.
A lot of the problem, says Lewis, is that children don’t learn history dates any more. I think she’s probably right. When I was about eight or nine I had a vast set of history dates dinned into me – with my enthusiastic cooperation I should add – and I’ve been fascinated by history, all history, any I could lay my hands on that was fun and made any sense, ever since. My only regret is that the list I imbibed wasn’t bigger and more global in its scope. I should guess that much the same applies to many of the regular readers of this blog. How can you understand history without getting a handle on the basic stuff that it happens in, namely time?
Yet this boringly chronological approach to history teaching was, Ms. Lewis tells us, abandoned in the 1970s for a more pick-and-mix, bring-it-alive and never-mind-when-exactly-it-happened approach to history, and the only bit that kids now want to pick is The Nazis.
This is not a matter of opinion, but of fact. An Ofsted report earlier this year confirmed that British pupils spend more time learning about the Nazis than any other period of history. Meanwhile, one survey after another suggests that our broader historical knowledge is dying out. The statistics are hair-raising. More than half of Britons are unaware that America used to be a British colony; 55 per cent believe that Elizabeth I introduced curry to this country; 17 per cent of teenagers cannot even guess in which century the First World War took place.
Never mind the Tudors and the Stuarts and the Industrial Revolution and the Suffragettes, what we want is Hitler!
Now that they can – and do – choose to spend almost every lesson poring over the evil deeds of history’s most infamous homicidal maniac, the evidence suggests that they love it. As one teacher bemoaned last week: “If you try to avoid him, the pupils say: ‘I was only doing history to study the Nazis.’ ” But a diet of unleavened Hitler is no good for anyone. We need to see the broader sweep of things.
But for me there is a huge irony here. For ask yourself this: why is Mr Clarke so anxious to de-Nazify the teaching of history in Britain? And why are German politicians making such a fuss about this issue? I’m sure that part of the answer is that they just are, and that as time goes by, the thing just gets more and more embarrassing and uncouth.
But I think that the EU is involved here. If a generation of Brits has now grown up thinking that “Europe equals Hitler”, that could be the popular opinion half of a British pincer movement against British EU provincehood, the other half being British elite hesitations. For as long as the “bloody Huns” view of history was confined to the old geezers who had actually fought against the Huns, then that sentiment could simply be left to die out with the old warriors. But now, it turns out, this sentiment is not dying out. The kids hate the Huns too! Indeed, that’s the only thing about the past that they’re sure of.
We are told again and again that British public opinion is now unchangeably against British becoming a province of the new EUropean nation that they are busily forging on the continent, to the point where this public opinion might not merely vote against the EU constitution if granted the opportunity, but actually vote for such an opportunity in the meantime. Where did this opinion come from? Might the “Hitlerisation” of British history teaching not be one of the big the culprits?
Ms. Lewis says that “a diet of unleavened Hitler is no good for anyone”. But if you are the type, as I am, who believes that Britain should shake itself free from EUro-provincehood, might you not reckon that the collapse of that more nuanced and informed and less melodramatic presentation of History – of History with lots of history dates and with that “broad sweep”, as Ms. Lewis terms it – turn out to have been … rather a good thing?
How huge an irony would that be? The very people who have worked hardest to beat British national pride out of Britain, namely the teaching profession and the theorisers of teaching who have been guiding them, have ended up with a kind of History that says only one thing: Germany bollocks!! Don’t want nothing to do with them bastards!!! As a result these anti-historical history persons, mostly rabidly pro-EU on anti-British grounds, could be achieving what looked impossible as recently as only a decade ago, namely the saving of Britain from permanent EUro-subjugation.
Lefty bastard enemies of British History, we hail you, the savours of British national independence.
Or, as Instapundit would say: Heh.
This article about how to (temporarily) neutralise surveillance cameras with laser beams looks interesting, which I got to via this guy (October 10th – scroll down – not real blog software).
The key point here, it seems to me, is that this doesn’t harm the camera permanently. It doesn’t fry any of its inner workings for when the next victim comes along. It simply stops it working while you are in the vicinity.
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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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