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]
|
I’m shocked, shocked:
A man attempting to sue farmer Tony Martin for loss of earnings is back in custody after allegedly breaching the terms of his release from prison.
Brendon Fearon, 33, of Newark, Notts, appeared before the town’s magistrates accused of stealing a Toyota Landcruiser on Aug 24.
He had been serving part of an earlier prison sentence on licence at his home and observing a 7pm to 7am curfew. He did not enter a plea at the hearing and spoke only to confirm his name and address.
Prison sources confirmed that Fearon is back in custody for allegedly breaching the terms of his licence and will be transferred to prison tonight.
There will probably be comments to the effect that here in the great state of (state your state) we do things better and this varmint would be dead by now. Personally, weighing up the evidence and taking a considered and reflective view of the matter, I agree. Tony Martin injured this person in circumstances of maximum fear and confusion. Had he shot him dead, on purpose, in broad daylight, it would have been no more than this nasty parasite deserved, and it would also, in my further opinion, have been “reasonable” (the key legal word here), in self defence against the inevitable next attack.
The Volokh Conspiracy highlights the jailing of an antiques dealer “for conspiring to receive antiquities claimed by a foreign government, in this case Egypt.”
This has been an earthquake of sorts for the American trade in antiquities, it is an open secret that most of the material is assembled against various foreign laws. Previously the American law was applied only to thefts from museums, churches, private homes, and the like, now for the first time it is being applied to thefts from archaeological sites. Dealers suddenly wonder whether they can stay in business. Observers wonder what is the difference between licit and illicit antiquities dealers, given how much of the material comes from sites.
Although the Volokh Conspirator agonizes over this issue in seeking a proper libertarian solution to the problems posed by the antiquities trade, it seems to me that the solution is quite simple in principle, and that the problem is entirely a creation of overweening governments.
As with any other item, an antiquity is properly on the market if the seller has proper title to it. For an old vase recovered from an archaeological site, the answer to who has title is (or should be) quite simple. The vase belongs to the archaeologist (or other person) who found it, unless it was found on private land, in which case it belongs to the landowner. The vase is, essentially, lost/abandoned/mislaid property in the sense that no one knows who the original (or last) owner was and/or no one can trace their living descendants. Under the common law, such property discovered anywhere other than private land belonged to the finder as against anyone but the true owner, meaning in an archeological context that the antiquities belong to the archaeologist, unless the dig was on private land, in which case it belongs to the owner.
The “problem” posed by the antiquities trade is entirely a creation of overweening governments, which have asserted a wholly unjustified ownership interest in all antiquities discovered within their borders. If one disregards this claim (as the American courts apparently did until this most recent case), then in principle it becomes possible to construct a valid chain of title for antiquities, and thus possible for the trade in these items to go forward on the same basis as every other line of business.
One wonders how other countries, especially the French (as I understand Paris is the center of gravity of the arts and antiquities trade), deal with this issue.
Much of the push towards compulsory ID cards, and, in general, towards huge nationally co-ordinated databases of information of every imaginable sort about individual citizens, is based on the wholly fallacious belief among those with no direct knowledge of how these things work that the information in all these databases is automatically going to be correct. Not even a terrorist with million dollar back-up will be able to diddle his way around, say, a policeman demanding to see his “papers”.
It follows, then, that any newspaper story which reports that any such databases might be repositories not of truth but also of falsehood is, to use a favourite phrase of mine here, “White Rose Relevant”. In fact I may start calling it just “WRR” for short.
This story, then, from the New York Times, is very WRR indeed:
WASHINGTON, Sept. 3 — About 3.3 million American consumers discovered within the last year that their personal information had been used to open fraudulent bank, credit card or utility accounts, or to commit other crimes, according to the Federal Trade Commission’s first national survey on identity theft.
The commission, in a report issued today, said these cases had collectively cost businesses $32.9 billion and consumers $3.8 billion.
In addition, 6.6 million people fell victim to account theft in the last year. Unlike identity theft, in which the criminal uses personal information to open and use accounts that are in the victim’s name, account theft entails using stolen credit or A.T.M. cards, or financial records, to steal from the victim’s existing accounts.
Such account-theft cases, the survey found, caused $14 billion in business losses and $1.1 billion in consumer losses. The vast majority of these cases, almost 80 percent, involved credit card fraud.
Though account theft and identity theft are often lumped together in popular perception, data from the survey showed that the consequences of identity theft were more severe. In identity theft, which accounted for nearly 10 million of the 27 million cases of both types in the last five years, the financial losses were greater, and it took victims longer to resolve the cases.
It is not just the fact of falsehood here. It is the scale of it. (Note the number of uses of the words “million” and “billion” in the above paragraphs.) Clearly, for certain sorts of people with certain sorts of friends, this kind of thing is not hard to do.
At last, the people of the world unite to take a stand against tyranny:
Casting aside petty differences and forging new allegiances, UN ambassadors said they would ignore New York’s smoking ban, imposed five months ago and extended to the UN this week.
Now that’s what I call multilateralism!
As expected, the refined orbital parameters of 2003QQ47 show no chance of impact with Earth.
Y’all can come out of your Asteroid Cellars now.
I first came across this story in the dead tree Times, and although the virtual Times probably has it too, we have a policy here at Samizdata about linking to that which is that we don’t.
So here is the same story from canada.com:
Researchers have discovered a genetic glitch that makes some smokers up to 10 times more likely to develop lung cancer than others, a finding that may explain why only 10 per cent of heavy smokers develop the deadly disease.
A simple blood test that will be able to detect which smokers are at an especially high risk of developing lung cancer could be on the market within three years, researchers told the Times of London.
Ah look, they got it from the Times too.
In other words, it will separate ordinary, high-risk smokers from extra high-risk smokers.
It will be interesting to see what the anti-smoking lobby makes of this. They ought to rejoice. But I think they will be angry.
Their starting axiom is that cigarettes are evil. If this discovery makes it that cigarettes actually do less harm than hitherto, that will be bad. They will react like hellfire preachers who have been informed that hell, for many sinners (now identifiable in advance), is not as hot as they had previously supposed, and that sin is accordingly less frightening for these particular sinners to indulge in.
Overall, smokers with low levels of the DNA-repairing enzyme were 120 times more likely to get lung cancer than non-smokers with normal OGG levels. Smokers with the genetic risk factor were also five to 10 times more likely to develop the disease than smokers with normal DNA repair activity.
So smokers with normal levels of DNA-repairing enzyme will now be sinning like there’s no tomorrow. Bad. Very bad.
It’ll be fun to watch.
I don’t think philosophically there’s a meeting of minds between Ayn Rand and Our Glorious Leader, Tony Blair:
I am not my brother’s keeper. – Ayn Rand
I am my brother’s keeper. – Tony Blair
You might think that being your brother’s keeper is fine. But when Tony Blair says that he is his brother’s keeper, what he actually means is that he wants to force everyone else to be this. The statement isn’t about him at all. If he really subscribed to the moral code he advocates, surely he would donate most of his income to the poor. Then again, when you hear middle-class socialists demanding higher taxes, and you ask them how much extra they personally should pay, they often reply back that only “the rich” – people richer than they are – should pay more.
By the end of today I will have been on BBC radio of various sorts twice. I just did a little spot on a Radio 2 talk show about taxes for or against. Guess which I was. I played the consumer electronics card. This is the one that says that since quality in things like computers and music boxes has in recent years skyrocketed and prices have sunk like so many stones dropping out of the sky, but that in the public sector this great stuff hasn’t happened, private sector hurrah public sector bah. Governments are catastrophically bad at spending money. The rapacity of governments in collecting money and the damage that does had already been covered, by George Trefgarne.
As usual in this sort of radio, I could have done better and I could have done worse. You land a few punches, give a few tried and tested memes a bit of a dust-over and maybe give some less familiar ones an outing. In among that you do some unnecessary um-ing and aah-ing and waffling. Then you put the phone down and get on with your life, which in my case now means boasting about having done this on Samizdata.
And then, tonight at 8pm, I will be contributing to a Radio 4 programme called “The Commission”. → Continue reading: A BBC radio day
White Rose notes that London’s police commissioner is calling for introduction of ID cards for all citizens as a means of combating terrorism and organised crime. The said commissioner is apparently opposed to any such “Big Brother” schemes but he needs “to have the ability to identify those people who are around doing their business lawfully and those other people who want to create mayhem and effectively destroy our way of life.”
And how exactly is that not Big Brother…?
It seems self-indulgent to regale readers of this blog with a personal gripe, but indulge me a moment. Like all too many Londoners, I usually have to take our Tube (subway) system to work. It is unpleasant. It is irregular. It is often extremely noisy and the air pollution is bad. In the summer months, it is incredibly hot (we Brits cannot figure out airconditioning without bleating about how vastly expensive it is). And it seems a cult of incompetence has gripped the organisation that runs it, like ivy creeping around the trunk of a tree.
This morning, on the Victoria line, all trains north and south were halted “owing to a signal failure in the Kings Cross area.” At least that is what I thought the announcer mumbled into the microphone, though the voice was so hushed and marked by embarrassed pauses that he or she could have been announcing something entirely different, such as last night’s football scores.
We gung-ho capitalists may hope that an injection of raw, competitive private enterprise will blast all this complacency and mule-headed uselessness away. Maybe. But sometimes I wonder whether if the country that built the first great railway network 150 or more years ago is capable of every again running big engineering projects with a modicum of talent.
Right, I’ll cheer up now.
According to Sir John Stevens, London’s police commissioner, Britain must introduce personal identity cards for all citizens if it is to combat the threat of terrorism and organised crime:
We are sure they would have a massively beneficial effect for us in fighting organised crime, human trafficking and terrorism.
He insisted that new biometric technology, which allows personal details such as fingerprint or retina identification to be included, made mandatory ID cards “a must”.
ID cards are an absolute essential part of armoury in the fight against terrorism and further organised crime. The excuse people say is that terrorists and organised criminals get round it. They might do. But in getting round it, it will identify who they are.
…
What I am totally against is the business whereby we can trace and follow people who have a normal life. But we do need to have the ability to identify those people who are around doing their business lawfully and those other people who want to create mayhem and effectively destroy our way of life.
And how would Sir John Stevens define a ‘normal life’? Such clarification is important since it is only those people who deserve to be left alone and not have their lives ‘traced and followed”….
It’s the desire of the police commissioner to have the ‘ability to identify those people who are around doing their business lawfully’ that keeps me awake at night. It seems the British police, despite their protests, are indeed in favour of the Big Brother or rather the Panopticon approach to crime where none happens because everyone is watched all the time. How about allowing people to defend themselves and their freedom? But that is inconceivable to the police mind since everyone is guilty of something at some time and you certainly should not be doing anything they don’t know about, just in case.
Just your ID card, ma’am.
Back in May of this year, the Mars Global Surveyer was commanded to turn its’ camera outwards at the solar system. These marvelous images show us the home system as not-so-far-future Martian colonists will see it.
I was particularly captivated by this view of North and South America as it would appear to an amateur astronomer.
Photo: NASA/JPL/Malin Space Science Systems
|
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