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The senior political commentator and Guardian newspaper columnist Hugo Young died at home last night, aged 64, after a long illness.
I used to worship Mr Young’s Mount Olympus of a column, many years ago, turning to it even before the daily Steve Bell cartoon, and have retained a soft spot for him to this day. I suppose that may have been because one dark evening Mr Young had to endure the lefty ravings of some drunken young student from Sheffield University, at some Guardian/NUS bash or other, as this young acolyte tried to suck out some of the greatness from the Great Man of the Left. But being from Sheffield himself, Mr Young tolerated this intoxicated idiot for quite some time, before breaking away to escape into the night.
That conversation taught me two things. One was to try to listen, and the other was to try to think. Hugo Young may have been one of our main political opponents, but he was also one of our best political opponents because he thought about what it was he wanted to say, before he then said it. He was also one of the few men on the Guardian unafraid of calling any situation how he saw it. For example, he recently said of David Blunkett:
At the apex of anti-liberalism, bragging his contempt, sits the most dangerous home secretary this country has ever known.
Well said, sir. The Left is seriously weakened by Hugo Young’s departure from this mortal coil, and shall not see his like again.
And although this post may seem strange, I felt compelled to write it. For although Hugo Young was a Titan standing in our way, from initial stirrings raised in that long ago conversation I must thank him for helping me to escape from the clutches of this self-same Left, and especially from men like David Blunkett. Hugo Young truly was a Great Man. May his soul Rest in Peace.
In an attempt to marshal my thoughts and arguments on the subject I’ve added some pages to my web site:
UK Compulsory National Identity Cards – The Case Against
Hopefully this’ll be of some use to those opposing Big Blunkett. There’s a load more that could be added (for example I haven’t even mentioned the problems with biometrics) but at least it’s a start.
The humbling of the WTO not only worsens economic prospects for the developing countries (as well as for the rest of the world) but also shifts the balance of global political power from poor to rich – perhaps decisively, and who knows for how many years. That is what the developing countries’ champions are so busy celebrating.
– The Economist
In a recent Boeing and USAF test, a B2 bomber dropped 80 bombs in 22 seconds… and hit 80 different targets. They call it revolutionary. I call it awesome to the point of being scary.
Perhaps in a future war we’ll only need two very large bombers. One as a backup for maintenance downtime… and the other to make a single war-ending zig-zag pass over enemy territory.
I was just thinking up a few scenarios in answer to the assertion that “a law abiding person has nothing to fear from ID cards, in-car tracking systems or surveillance cameras”. These are some wholly or mostly law-abiding persons who do have something to fear:
- A person who has unpopular political beliefs of left or right that might lose them their job or promotion.
- A person who is homosexual but their family does not know.
- A teenage girl secretly visiting her boyfriend. He is of a different race to her family, and they have forbidden her to see him.
- A man who is seeking to change his job needs to attend interviews with other companies. He doesn’t want his present employer to know for fear that if the interviews don’t work out he might end up worse off than before, having lost the confidence of his boss.
- A woman scouting out places to go to get away from her violent partner.
- Someone going to Alcoholics Anonymous or drugs rehabilitation sessions.
- Someone going to church, synagogue or mosque who fears the scorn of their secular friends, colleagues or family.
- Someone attending classes of religious instruction prior to converting to another religion who fears the vengeance of their family if their apostasy becomes known.
- A son or daughter visiting an estranged parent without the knowledge of the parent they live with.
- An ex-criminal seeking to go straight who must meet his probation officer or register with the police.
- An adulterer. (I think adultery is very wrong, but I don’t want the government involved in exposing it – besides the intrinsic nastiness of state intervention in such matters, you can bet they would expose the adulteries of their opponents and pass over the adulteries of their friends.)
That example takes us to a more general point: there are so many laws that nearly all of us are breaking some of them all the time. This fact gives local and national authorities enormous scope for quiet blackmail. You think it’s unlikely that they would be so wicked? Well, the blackmailers themselves might scarcely see it as blackmail. Imagine this scenario: they get to know that X, an irritating serial complainer, writer of letters to the editor, and general thorn in the side of several local councillors, is attending an adult education class for more than the number of hours permitted to an unemployed person who is meant to be actively seeking work. How satisfactory to take action against this pest! Meanwhile Y, who sat next to X in the class and is equally unemployed and equally breaking the rules (or equally unaware of them), is ignored because he is not a troublemaker.
It’s one thing to promise not to pass on data to other organisations, and it’s another thing again not to pass on data to other organisations:
JetBlue Airways passengers, more than a million of them, have been unsuspecting guinea pigs in a Defense Department contractor’s experiment in mining commercial databases to assess the risk of a person turning out to be a terrorist. The airline admits it violated its own privacy policy when it acceded to the Pentagon’s request to give passenger records to Torch Concepts, a private technology business that was ostensibly creating a program to enhance security at military bases.
That’s paragraph one of a New York Times story today. This is the final para:
This misstep only feeds legitimate consumer fears that companies and governments are too quick to use private data in unauthorized ways. It is worrisome, in this regard, that the Homeland Security Department has already backtracked from its original vow to use its passenger-profiling program only to fight terrorism. There is now talk of turning it into an all-purpose law-enforcement tool. For its part, in addition to ascertaining what actually took place, Congress may also need to consider new legal protections for consumers’ privacy.
Mission creep, in other words.
That lonely, marginalised, oppressed siren voice in the wilderness John Pilger has managed to escape from the daggers of the vicious McCarthyite witch-hunt that has cowed so many into a silence that has prevented them from speaking the truth about America and the war in Iraq.
This brave, determined peace-campaigner has finally succeeded in casting off the shackles of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy that has, hitherto, so ruthlessly crushed his dissent with a one-hour television special screened earlier tonight on ITV1, Britain’s most popular TV channel. There is no link here, mostly because I couldn’t be bothered to go and look for one.
Neither could I actually be bothered to watch the programme. I have been exposed to enough of Pilger’s toxic, manipulative propoganda to know in advance exactly the kind of things he was going to be whining about. In fact, I think I can even summarise them:
Bush. Warmongers. Neo-Conservatives. Oil. Conspiracy. World domination. Capitalism. Globalisation. Unfair trade. Bush. Oil. Rumsfeld. Wolfowitz. CIA. Mossad. Inequality. Poverty. Despair. Hopelessness. Arms trade. Environment. Sharon. Zionist thugs. Oppression. Cruelty. Palestinians. Bush. Oil. Blair. NATO. Poodles. American bullying. Human rights. Amnesty International. Unilateral. Nuremburg trials. Nazis. Aggression. Bush regime. Conquer the world. Crush dissent. United Nations is our only hope.
And those were the good bits!
I really don’t know how all these so-called ‘civil libertarians’ can possibly live with themselves. Don’t they care about the children?
Children are frightened of speeding traffic and want more measures to make roads safer, a survey has suggested.
Three-quarters of children questioned said they wanted more speed cameras.
About 70% thought drivers should go slower near their school, with almost as many wanting drivers to slow down near their house.
Half of the 1,500 children surveyed wanted safer places to cross the road.
The findings of the survey of children aged 7-14 in city schools by road safety charity Brake were released to coincide with the annual Road Safety Week.
A good friend of mine who has been professionaly engaged in market research has provided me with chapter and verse on just how ludicrously easy it is to get the answers that the researcher wants. Quadruple the easiness when the views being solicited are those of children.
A ‘road safety charity’?
I have just heard a reporter on the BBC ‘Newsnight’ show describe the European Common Agricultural Policy as an expensive ‘boondoggle’.
I cannot recall ever having heard that term used in the mainstream British press before. Is that a first?
David Sucher has news of a conference, and reckons that White Rose ought to be monitoring what was being talked about.
Says David:
“Ubiquitous Computing” means “computing technology that migrates beyond our desktops onto our hands, heads and clothing, and becomes increasingly embedded in a wide variety of other objects, such as walls, cars and appliances.”
I don’t know about Denmark but it sounds as if there is something rather rotten going on in the state of Italy according to this report in the UK Times:
ROMANS are to be offered cut-price family meals in a novel attempt by the city’s authorities to curb inflation that has plagued Italy since the introduction of euro notes and coins at the beginning of last year.
The scheme, called Shopping Sport, starts on October 1 in the city’s 140 street markets. Stallholders will be asked to offer shoppers a basket containing enough ingredients to make a meal for four people, including meat or fish, vegetables and dessert, for €12 (£8.34).
Restaurants, bars, hairdressers, garages, plumbers and supermarkets have also been asked to join the campaign. For example, restaurants will be expected to offer a starter, a pizza and a pudding for €12 — and it should be possible to get a morning cappuccino and croissant for €1.50 (£1.05). The authorities will publish a list of the businesses taking part.
Begging your pardon and all that, but doesn’t that sound an awful lot like price-fixing?
Newspapers run stories almost daily on the “real” inflation rate, which some put as high as 30%. Even everyday items such as bread and milk have risen by 16% and a bus ticket by 29% since December 2001, according to Consumer’s Contract, a group that lobbies for consumers’ rights.
Italians voted with their purses last week, staging a consumer “strike” in which as many as 40% of people were reported to have taken part in some areas. Further action is planned around Christmas. Some shops also shut for the day in a sign of solidarity with their customers.
And doesn’t that sound an awful lot like galloping inflation?
So galloping inflation and price-fixing. Isn’t that precisely the kind of Banana Republic economics that the introduction of the single currency was supposed to banish?
[My thanks to
The Galileo space probe yesterday concluded its mission by entering the Jovian atmosphere and disintegrating at 1957 hours GMT. During its 14 year mission, Galileo sent back more than 14000 images, and highlights of the mission involved watching a comet crash into Jupiter and finding evidence of large oceans under the ice of Jupiter’s moon Europa.
Galileo really tested the ingenuity of the people controlling the mission at JPL, who firstly had to figure out a way for the probe to reach Jupiter despite having to use a much less powerful rocket to launch it from the space shuttle than originally intended, and then later to find a way for it to complete its mission despite the failure of its high gain antenna, meaning that data could only be transmitted at a much lower rate than originally intended.
However, ways were found, and Galileo ended up being an utterly magnificent success. We criticise the present form of NASA a lot, usually with good reason, but this mission is one that was ultimately got right. To everyone connected with it, might I offer a hearty “well done”. I’ll miss watching the photos and data come in.
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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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