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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I recently returned from an extremely relaxing weekend in the fine Spanish city of Barcelona with my girlfriend. I have fallen for the great Catalan metropolis, the home of the weird and wonderful architecture of Gaudi.
During a stroll around the old city centre, I came across one of the most astonishing shops I have ever seen. It was a shop selling just about every kind of sword, knife and gun. Samurai swords nestled among racks of old Winchester repeater rifles, copies of 15th century broadswords, cutlasses, calvalry sabres, hunting knives, old pistols. Amazing.
I do not speak Spanish very well, so I wasn’t able to discover from the shop owner as to what kind of laws exist in Spain regulating the sale of such weapons, but it was clear that laws in Spain are far, far more liberal than is the case in Britain. And on the basis of trips to other parts of Continental Europe, it would appear that the law is also more liberal than in the UK.
Why this is so is something on which I don’t have an easy answer. Spain is a country less infected, so it seems to me, by political correctness and the culture of ‘victimhood’. Whatever else you think of it as an activity, a country that embraces bullfighting as one of its most popular ‘sports’ clearly has not fallen under the rule of Guardianistas (although I find bullfighting pretty revolting).
We often slip into the comforting notion that we in the free Anglosphere are so much less regulated than our European peers, and in the realm of business and finance, this is true, on the whole. But let’s give credit where credit is due. It appears that in certain aspects of life, Europe is actually more liberal.
Oh, and the tapas tasted fantastic.
This Telegraph article gives a slightly different angle to Guardian’s story yesterday as it talks about the ID pilot scheme in the context of a new biometric passport:
David Blunkett was accused yesterday of using a pilot scheme for a new biometric passport as a test run for a national identity card. Civil liberties campaigners said the Home Secretary was disguising his true purposes in a backdoor attempt to gauge public reaction to ID cards.
Over the next few years, passports are to be adapted to resemble credit cards containing biometric information, such as iris patterns or fingerprints.
Shami Chakrabarti, the director of Liberty, said:
The Home Office is being disingenuous. They know that they can’t trial ID cards without parliamentary approval, so they are doing it through the back door… They have admitted that the information gleaned from this so-called passport trial will be used for the purposes of an ID card.
The state is not your friend.
This needs to be read here:
I’m still reading this blog, and I’m still not feeling like blogging for it. And I’ve finally figured out why. It’s a boys’ club. Not that I don’t love boys, but it’s one thing hanging out in the bar with them and quite another trying to get them to take you seriously when you’re talking, um, golf, with them. Digital ink, ID cards, government inquiries, Mars, US politics, transport … it’s a man’s world. And frankly, I am not man enough to go up there and start talking about shoes. Don’t interpret any of that as insulting: I read Samizdata every day, and find it not only interesting and righter than lots of other places, but diverse and entertaining as well. In a very very male kind of a way.
Hm. Yeah. Good point, er, what did you say your name was again? Alice. Yeah. So. Tell us about shoes then. How are they designed? – do they use the latest materials for those super-thin high heels? – you know, the ones the Space Programme made for the outsides of Shuttles, I bet they do, and get those acrylic surfaces, first used in the automobile industry I believe (although I’m open to correction on this – I’m not any sort of techno-fanatic you understand), for the Ford Psychopath ZPX100 Concept Car in 1971 which never made it into production but which looked really cool, like a Dan Dare rocket …
That’s enough about shoes. Get a load of this:
Shaped like a giant jellyfish and sheltered from the sun beneath its own artificial clouds, the world’s first underwater luxury hotel is to open beneath the waves of the Persian Gulf within three years.
The 220-suite Hydropolis Hotel in the Arab emirate of Dubai will cost £310 million to build. It aims to charge guests up to £3,500 per night and to provide them with the last word in undersea luxury.
It will be built of toughened, clear plastic Plexiglas, concrete and steel. Guests will be able to experience the sensation of sleeping in the sea by booking a bubble-shaped suite – including a clear glass bath tub – offering views of the sea life all around.
For those worried about terrorist attack, it will boast a high level of security, including anti-missile radar. If disaster does strike in one section, it can be sealed off with watertight doors.
Babe magnet or what?
Actually, Alice might quite like a night in that.
I don’t think that this article from August 13th, by Paul Craig Roberts, has had any mention here. If it has, apologies for not noticing. If not, better very late than never, I hope you agree.
Opening paragraphs:
When will the first lawyer be arrested, indicted and sent to prison for failing to help the government convict his client? You can bet it will be soon. Once the Securities and Exchange Commission, Internal Revenue Service and U.S. Department of Justice (sic) complete their assault on the attorney-client privilege, they will rush to make an example of a lawyer, lest any fail to understand that their new role in life is to serve as government informants on their clients.
Just as government bureaucrats used the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 to assault the Bill of Rights and our constitutional protections, they are now using “accounting scandals” and “tax evasion” to assault the attorney-client privilege, a key component of the Anglo-American legal system that enables a defendant, whether guilty or innocent, to mount a defense against the overwhelming power of the state.
This is the sort of thing that David Carr has been writing about in Britain, for some time now.
Ever since Instapundit pointed out, during all that faking of stories scandal, that the NYT may be politically all over the place on pages one, two, etc., but that on page n as n tends to infinity it has great technology coverage, I’ve been making a point of looking at that, and he’s right.
This, for example, from the New York Times today, sounds really interesting:
Standing on four metal legs, under two banks of fluorescent lights, was what appeared to be a modest-size billboard, measuring about 9 feet wide by 4 feet in height. Across its face, which looks like paper under glass, was a full-color advertisement for a soft drink maker. A few moments later the ad disappeared and was digitally replaced with a different one, and then another, like a screensaver cycling through images on a laptop computer screen.
But the surface of this billboard is not a liquid crystal diode screen – the energy-hungry display common to laptops and increasingly to cellphones, digital cameras, digital organizers and flat-screen computer monitors and television sets. Neither does this billboard share the light-emitting-diode technology that makes million-dollar-plus video screens light up the night in Times Square, Las Vegas and sports arenas around the world.
What makes the electronic billboard in Jersey City possible (and those installed for trials in London, Tokyo, Toronto and Panama City, among other locations) is an innovation by a New York-based display technology company whose name, Magink, is a combination of the words magic and ink. Its approach to imaging departs from the way most text, graphics and images are electronically presented, including the way expensive plasma screens work, as well as cathode-ray tubes, the old workhorses still found in most television sets and desktop computer monitors.
By creating a paste made of tiny helix-shaped particles that can be minutely manipulated with electric charges to reflect light in highly specific ways, Magink can produce surfaces that look like paper but behave like electronic screens, rendering high-resolution, full-color images without ink – or, as Magink executives like to refer to the process, with digital ink.
Ran Poliakine, chief executive of Magink, said the idea was to create visually compelling ads that could be replaced frequently – perhaps hourly, based on consumer response – and could be controlled remotely, all with far less energy and at a far lower cost than a video billboard.
It looks like paper. It’s cheaper than the usual screens, and easier to update. “Digital ink.” Wow.
I’m not any sort of techno-buff, but it sounds as if this technology differs radically from the usual screen technology in that it starts out being pretty big, but is rather hard to make small enough to fit on my desk. But they’ll get there, surely.
I don’t know about you, but when I am faced with a twenty page article on the internet, I do a print-out. Paper is just so much nicer than that screen shining so brightly at you. It’s the difference between reading something on the surface of a torch, and reading something on a surface. This stuff doesn’t shine light at you in an exhausting glare. It just reflects it, the way paper does.
It often happens that advertising cleans out the tubes of a new way of presenting messages, if only because novelty itself is the lifeblood of advertising – it gets your attention even if it does look cranky, because it looks cranky. Ten years later, it isn’t so cranky anymore and the advertisers are losing interest. But the R&D has had a big early contribution and Western Civilisation marches onwards. Just one more reason to love advertising.
Because what this really sounds like to me is the future of … reading!
The Guardian reports that ID cards are to be pilot tested in ‘a small market town’ by the home office. Biometrics will be tested – facial, iris and fingerprint recognition systems.
I am horrifiied that the government is inching towards making us instantly identifiable and knowing too much. Once they have ID cards they will be that much nearer to integrating tax and passport systems, no doubt under the cover of anti-terrorist rhetoric. “To be controlled in our economic pursuits means to be…controlled in everything” said Hayek. To control us they need to know us, this is a fight we must not lose.
Paul Staines
Ed. update: White Rose has more on the subject as it keeps a closer eye on issues of ID cards, privacy, surveillance and other vagaries of state…
Yesterday saw some interesting developments at the Hutton inquiry:
Mr Doberman: Have you anything to say for yourself, Mr Hoon?
Hoon: Yes. It wasn’t me. I wasn’t there. It was someone else.
Mr Doberman: So you didn’t do it?
Hoon: No. It was that other bloke, you know, the other fella. But it certainly wasn’t me.
Mr Doberman: But you still take the full buck-stopping Cabinet salary as a Secretary of State for the Ministry of Defence?
Hoon: Oh yes. I love earning well over a hundred and thirty grand a year.
Mr Doberman: For doing little that anyone can clearly discern?
Hoon: Yes, Mr Doberman. That’s right. I really do know absolutely nothing. I was only obeying my permanent secretary’s orders.
Mr Doberman: So what are you then, Mr Hoon? Are you a hopeless liar? Or are you a hapless goon?
Hoon: No, it’s ‘Hoon’, ‘Geoff Hoon’.
Mr Doberman: Thank you, Mr Goon. No further questions.
So it seems today is Antony Charles Linton Blair’s Big Day Out. His last Blairite ex-friend in the Cabinet, Geoff Hoon, has stitched him up big time, good and proper, a man obviously unprepared to fall on his sword to protect the Master. Which is just as well, seeing as the Master was going to drop Hoon down a chute, feed him to the wolves, and forget him as yesterday’s bad rubbish.
So like rats in a trap they’ve all finally turned upon one another. And a certain James Gordon Brown circles the rats, grinning from ear to ear. And who can blame him? I suspect the Master will still make it through today though, almost in one piece, but with the Hutton report hanging over him like the sword of Damocles. But it’s going to be a helluva dogfight, it seems, to get rid of Hoon, who doesn’t appear to be doing the decent thing and going gracefully.
And then it’s going to be that great big Cabinet office for Blair with not a friend in sight, Brownites to the left of me, Brownites to the right of me, here I am, stuck in the middle facing the Chancellor. Oh to be a fly on the wall.
Latest Duncan Fortune 500 betting odds? Blair out by bonfire night (November 5th), retired, injured hurt. I must brush up on some biographies of Gordon.
Today’s Guardian reports:
The home secretary, David Blunkett, is to stage a pilot scheme this autumn to test the introduction of a national identity card despite the lack of strong cabinet backing for the idea.
The Home Office confirmed last night that a six-month trial, testing the use of new generation fingerprint and eye-scanning technology, would be completed by April to “assess customer perceptions and reactions” and estimate costs. It is believed that the trial will be carried out in an as yet unnamed small market town with a population of about 10,000.
Note, as did Guardian home affairs editor Alan Travis, the creepy use of the word “customer”.
UPDATE: Paul Staines comments at Samizdata.
Is this beautiful or what?
(Labelled version here. Descriptions of how the Hubble Space Telescope took the photo here).
(Link via slashdot).
Update:
This infrared image taken by the UK Infrared Telescope in Hawaii is claimed to be one of the sharpest ground-based photos of Mars ever taken. (Descriptions here and labelled version here).
Sadly, I think that the position of Samizdata’s representative in the first hundred may already be filled.
Further Update:
Having just adopted the advanced astronomical technique of opening my window and looking in a vaguely easterly direction, I have to agree with Dale that Mars is extraordinarily bright, particularly given that it is only about 30 degrees above the horizon right now, and I am in the middle of the light pollution of a metropolitan area of eleven million people. I will go out and have another look in a few hours when it is directly overhead, and I have to go somewhere on the weekend where there are fewer lights. I also have to take careful note of what other planets are viewable and where they are in the sky, as the comparison is no doubt interesting.
Jane Galt has a thought-provoking post on the structural instability of the Democratic Party.
The Democrats, on the other hand, are a veritable festival of interest groups: unions, teachers, minorities, feminists, gay groups, environmentalists, etc. Each of these groups has a litmus test without which they will not ratify a candidate: unfettered support for abortion, against vouchers, against ANWAR drilling, whatever. A lot of groups means a lot of litmus tests, because with the possible exception of the teachers, no one group is powerful enough to swing an election by themselves.
. . . .
But the larger problem is that those interest groups are increasingly coming into conflict. African-americans want vouchers, but the more powerful teacher’s union says no. Latinos trend strongly pro-life, but don’t let NARAL catch them at it. Environmentalists want stricter standards that cost union members jobs. The more interest groups under the tent, the looser the grip the party has on any one group. And as social security and medicare turn into the sucking chest wound of the budget, the money for the programs that Democratic politicians have traditionally used to cement those interest groups to them is disappearing.
One can only hope. While I have little use for Republicans, I can at least sympathize with the tattered remains of their fiscal conservative wing, and they do occasionally put up a proposal, like tax cuts, that I can actively support. I honestly cannot remember the last major Democratic proposal that I supported – the Democrats are truly, through and through, the party of state expansion. In their eyes, there is no protruding nail that cannot, and should not, be battered down with hammer of the State. Even their lone “civil liberties” plank – the right to abortion – is shot through with inconsistency and has morphed into a demand for state funding, support, protection, and promotion of abortion. I would shed no tears for the collapse of the Democratic “coalition,” or for the less likely collapse of the Republicans.
I hope it is time for one of the periodic great realignments in American politics. Certainly, the collapse of one of the two major political power centers is a necessary precondition for such a realignment. The current polarities reflected in the two dominant parties are hopelessly blurred iterations of the class struggles of the ’30s, for crying out loud. A realignment might serve to create parties that will debate the one true issue of politics – the scope and power of the State. Currently, this issue is simply out of phase with the structure and ingrained habits and positions of the parties, as a result of which both consistently plump for a larger and more intrusive State. For chrissake, even tax cuts are sold with a pitch that the economic growth they will trigger will in turn result in increased government revenues.
Without an historic realignment of the political parties that channel and mold preference into politics into policy, the growth of the State in the US will continue unabated.
I was in a dilemma this morning. I was just coming up to the last chapter of Mr Steven Pinker’s seminal work, Blank Slate, and reckoned I needed another 20 minutes to finish it. Unfortunately, my usual Tube journey takes me about 15 minutes. So what to do? Ha ha, I thought, I’ll take the Circle Line instead. This is always full of delays.
But then a Circle Line train pulled up almost immediately, full of empty seats, and raring to go. Foiled! I thought, once again, by a socialised transport system which even fails to be late when that’s what you require. So, resigned to getting to my client’s office on time, I set about the last chapter. However, I was not to be disappointed.
For there was a delay getting into Edgeware Road station! Oh, yes. → Continue reading: Pinker, or bluer, or freer?
So did you vote for Ken Livingstone, at the last London mayoral election? Are you pleased? No doubt many voted for Ken to try to wipe the smile off Tony Blair’s perma-grin face, but a few are now beginning to regret their actions. The average London poll tax payer is now contributing over £220 pounds a year to fund Ken’s baronial circus, on the Thames, with most of it going on the 640 bureaucrats and image consultants he employs to project his avuncular Big Brother image around the capital.
His solution-is-worse-than-the problem congestion charge, currently being swamped by the legal costs of two-finger-saluting defaulters, has severely curtailed trade in the West End, particularly the pre-theatre restaurant trade, and his plans to the increase the usage of those very long and very empty bendy-buses, which dribble continuously past my current client’s offices here in Holborn, will put another additional £200 pounds onto the poll tax payers’ bills, at the very least. So are you still glad you voted for him?
Yes, there’s the rapacious Gordon Brown and his thirst for stamp duty, both on house sales and share transactions, which is draining the carotid arteries of London’s economic golden goose, but if you think you could spend £420 pounds a year, of your own money, better than Big Ken does right now on social engineering, it may be time to start thinking of another lizard to vote for next time. Unfortunately, Mr Schwarzenegger is unavailable. → Continue reading: The Oyster-Catcher
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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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