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]
|
The BBC reports on the latest application of RFID technology: London Undergound’s new “Oyster” cards.
These are smart cards that will replace existing season tickets. The advantage is that they don’t even have to be swiped through a gate and will hopefully speed passenger flow through the stations.
The disadvantage is that they will be personalised to you and will – surprise, surprise – record full details of every journey you make on a central database. This information will be retained for “a number of years”.
Even more worrying, there have been suggestions that the people responsible for these cards are keen to extend them to “other applications”.
An anonymous card will be available, but will cost more. An estimated £200 pa for an average commuter.
So the question for London commuters is: Are you willing to sell your privacy for 200 quid?
Cross-posted from The Chestnut Tree Cafe
It sticks in the craw to say it, but Hillary is the only one of the Democrats who sounds Presidential. The rest of them are dwarves with limited understanding of the requirements of the job for which they are auditioning.
She and her significant other have consistantly backed Bush on the WMD issue. By admitting they saw the same intelligence reports and by taking responsibility for policy initiatives they set in motion, they appear as statesmen. They have a solidness and class that is severely lacking amongst the Democratic candidates.
I rather look forward to a Condi v Hillary match in 2008. That is an election for which the cemeteries really would get out the vote.
In a recent article Steven den Beste discusses the fate of human shield Faith Fippinger. If I were to look at this in a narrow context I’d probably agree with him. However… there are parts of the argument expressed by den Beste and others which I find troubling.
I cannot imagine myself standing in a Saddamite factory to stop speeding american bullets, but I can indeed arrive at scenarios in which I would find civil disobedience of this sort or even greater personally justifiable. So let us play “invent a scenario”.
It’s now 2015 and a bunch of us libertarians have gotten so fed up with statists that we’ve built a floating island and anchored it to a Pacific seamount. Unlike an earlier group displaced by a Tonga gunboat, we’re well armed, well trained and ready to defend our new country.
Everything goes well for a few years. We expand the island with landfill and more platforms, the population grows and our little libertopia waxes wealthy and happy as we always imagined it would.
We won’t join the UN or become signatories to any of its treaties. After all, how can we? We don’t have a government. Any individuals on our island may sign if they wish, but by doing so they bind no one else. They can not even bind their own children once they leave home… and in some families not even before…
Some are making a good living with little floating pot-patches. Free market banks are popping up all over the island with rules on privacy which would have made a 1930’s Swiss Bank president smile. We do not recognize tax collection attempts by other countries. Sure, a bank may cave in if it wishes, but there are other banks and the market will decide. The new cloning business is bringing in money hand over fist. A bunch of the top nanotech people have moved in and are pushing things ahead quickly. Several commercial space launch companies got fed up with the spaceship size stacks of regulatory paperwork and left America. They now consider themselves citizens of the island… or whatever you call yourself in a place without a government.
However… there is a fly in the ointment. All of the above are extremely threatening to the existing world order. Our very pacific existence undermines the rest of the world. One day after some dastardly world event it is decided by the President and her men that we are an easy target. Our banks won’t give them details on fortunes hidden from tax collectors and we’re getting all too technologically successful.
Now as either a resident of that island or a resident in the US, I know exactly which side I am on. The issues are crystal clear to me. I do not support or give allegience to a flag; I give it to particular principles and the people who at any given time best embody those principles. For most of the last two centuries and certainly for all of my lifespan, that has been the USA.
But what if some place comes along that is freer and is considered a threat to the USA because of it?
I would suddenly find myself an Enemy of the State.
‘Petrol Price Rise Announced’ blares the BBC Headline:
Fuel duty will rise by 1.28p a litre from 1 October, the Treasury has confirmed.
The increase, which will add five pence a gallon to petrol and diesel prices, is in line with inflation, it said.
So it isn’t a ‘price rise’ at all. It’s a tax increase
I think the public has a right to be told in less ambivalent terms.
Ministers are preparing legislation for the next session of parliament to make local authorities create files on every child in England, including intimate personal information about parents’ relationships with other partners and any criminal record, alcohol or drug abuse in the extended family. The files will be available to teachers, social workers, NHS staff and other professionals dealing with children to help them piece together symptoms of neglect or abuse that might require intervention by the authorities.
The green paper produced as a response to the murder of Victoria Climbié, an eight-year-old who died in London in 2000 after months of torture and neglect, said the need to protect children had to be balanced against preserving the privacy of parents. But Charles Clarke, the education secretary, said yesterday that the interests of children “absolutely” took precedence over the civil liberties of adults.
Mark Littlewood, the campaigns director of Liberty, said Mr Clarke’s remarks were even more disturbing than the green paper.
We have to make sure social workers are sharper, smarter and better focused. That’s done by better training, not by casting the net so wide that every child in the country will be in it. That creates the danger that investigations will be triggered by supposition, guesswork, gossip and rumour. Our concern is that there will be witchhunts rather than protection of the relatively small number of children in real danger.
Another ‘truth’ constantly parroted at us is bin Laden would never work with Saddam. As with the bin Laden was trained by the CIA meme, it can be difficult to remember or find the refuting evidence when you need it. Fortunately, someone has done it for us.
It is a good summary, but Richard Miniter (author of Losing bin Laden) left out at least one item.
The Adam Smith Institute Weblog seems to have hit the ground running, and Jonny Fraser’s piece about harassment in the USA by cops and bureaucrats and stupid laws is provoking a fine old comment fest. Quote:
On entering the country, with no matter what passport, you are treated like a criminal or socio-economic migrant. Several forms need to be filled in, many of their requirements duplicated, unnecessary and arbitrary. This practice does not stop at international boundaries. There are occasional police checks on interstate roads, and even occasionally at state borders. Post 9/11 fear is all encompassing.
Rights are being eroded and regulations piled on like cheese and freedom fries at a burger joint. It seems that obesity and laughable laws have a bizarre relationship. In America, you can die for your country at 18, but you cannot buy a beer until you are 21. In America you can kill on the roads with reckless driving at 15 in some states, but experienced drivers usually have to stay below 55 miles per hour or risk a ludicrously overpriced speeding ticket.
California is the worst state for this sort of thing. Their claim to liberalism extends as far as a blanket ban on smoking in public places, …
I particularly liked Kevin Carson’s comment, responding to American critics of American critics. Final paragraph:
Well guess what? I DO have a bad attitude. It’s because of people with “bad attitudes” that we’re not still working on chain gangs to build a pyramid, or eating our lunches standing up during a sixteen hour shift on an assembly line. For every liberty that sets us above the level of a slave, you can thank somebody with a bad attitude. Rights are not granted by government; they are forced on it from below.
It is good that the ASI blog is not confining itself to municipal bus privatisation and such like. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
‘Our man in Basra’ is back in the UK, with some first hand stories and a different perspective on what is going on both in Iraq and in the media. His first post (out of three planned so far) is about his view of the media and why they report the events in Iraq the way they do.
Most people have an implicit, nebulous, and generally unthought through understanding of the media and what their job is. It has to do something with getting the facts and reporting the truth or at least the reality to the best of their abilities. The media is a sort of civilian intelligence agency. This is how the military, in particular, view them and when the media are not reporting the facts, they are seen as failing in their job.
The media do not see their job in this light at all. Their job is to find and sell stories. Of course, these should not be completely divorced from the facts, but facts are merely the raw materials of the stories. More importantly, the media do not feel obliged to report all the facts, especially in a place like Iraq, where there is either very intense competition among reporters and therefore not much time to investigate the story in detail. Alternatively, the interest is fading a bit, so it is not worth investing the time. Either way, the result is the same.
What has become obvious to me while in Basra and helped me understand the media better is that they have now decided what their story is in Iraq. They have signed up this story as their product before they even arrive. They are not there to research ‘the facts’ – they are merely looking to illustrate their story. → Continue reading: The media story
Please, prepare yourselves for a shock. Sit down on a comfortable chair and secure that goldfish. For I’m about to rock your world. Yes, friends, some EU corruption has been discovered within the gilded halls of Strasbourg.
I know, it beggers belief, but there it is. Millions of €uros have apparently been diverted into slush funds to pay for holidays, freebies, and extravagant dinners. So, who are the thieves? This money was allegedly stolen by the EU’s own number crunchers. Whisper it quietly to your friends, but apparently they left no audit trail, too! Quelle horreur! And some of the money stolen was used to form a volleyball team! Crikey.
I was sitting on the train, this morning, minding my own business, and this story hove into view. It was such a non-event, such a non-story, that at first it completely passed me by. For I was under the mistaken impression that the entire EU budget already was a giant slush fund, for useless bureaucrats such as Neil Kinnock to dip their greedy snouts into. But I was wrong. Apparently, it is just the EU number crunchers who are corrupt! Thank goodness for that. I’ve been labouring under a misapprehension, all this time.
Fortunately, EU officials have said a full judicial inquiry will establish whether senior number crunching staff have indeed stolen EU funds. No doubt the results from this inquiry will be swift, and the punishments severe. Let’s hope they make some of these naughty number crunchers fly business class, for a change, rather than first class. For at least a whole week. They deserve nothing less.
Samizdata.net often makes references to the importance of the ‘meta-context’ in explaining and determining events around us. A question to consider: What would happen if the mainstream media were somehow forced to refer to Saddam’s old regime by its own official title, which is The Arab National Socialist Party or Arab NAZI Party? What a thought…
There seems to be a lot more information floating about now than there was last week. The first Chinese orbital flight might come as soon as October 1st, but probably not until mid month.
You may remember I suggested the Chinese will aim for the moon within a few decades. I’m not a lone voice: here is what Space.com has to say:
Although tight-lipped on a range of technical details, Chinese space officials have hinted at a multi-pronged human spaceflight program, including space station construction, as well as eventual travel to the Moon, all by 2020.
I’ve some friends that hope to be able to offer them a hotel room with a nice Mare view by that time.
Patrick Crozier has a modest plan for the rejuvenation of London…
With the mayoral election less than a year away I feel it time that I declared my hand. OK, so this is not entirely serious. Any candidacy would need funds, an organisation, assembly candidates and all those involved would have to realise that it wouldn’t have a prayer and that the only purpose of the exercise would be to secure publicity. But if we did have all those things this would be my manifesto. That’s the great thing about manifestos: they’re cheap.
Some Observations and Some Basic Principles
London is a great city – after all, it’s home to most of Samizdata’s writers. Millions of people would seem to agree with them coming here from all over the world to find a better life for themselves. But London seems to be getting worse when it could be getting a lot better. In particular it suffers from three major problems: crime, transport and property prices. My aim, if elected, would be to: reduce crime by 90%, reduce property prices by 50% and to make getting around the city a simple and predictable (if not necessarily cheap) business.
I believe that civilisation is at its best when people are free. It is freedom which promotes prosperity, innovation and responsibility. And yet for 100 years we have been chipping away at freedom, progressively heaping taxation and regulation upon a once free people with results that are all too plain to see. If London is to be better then first it must be free.
Housing
Property is too expensive. With a three-bedroom house costing six or seven times the average wage, millions are postponing and even abandoning the idea of having children. This is hardly a sustainable state of affairs. Prices are high because demand is high and supply is low. The answer is to increase the supply.
If elected I would abolish all planning laws and all building regulations. Immediately, people would start to build. Up mainly. And why not? We shouldn’t be scared of living in flats. Many people around the world enjoy good quality high-rise living where raising a family is as easy and as pleasant as living in a semi-detached. All that we have to do is to allow it to happen. I believe that by scrapping the regulations we will see the development of all sorts of new ideas in architecture as well as a massive increase in capacity. We might well see the development of self-build (people designing their own houses) as is seen in places like France and Spain.
Would we lose all our nice old buildings? Some, for sure, but do we really need all of them, especially as there is a chance we might get some nice, new ones in exchange? → Continue reading: Crozier for Mayor
|
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