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 wonder how many of our readers went to see the film ‘Minority Report’ and came away thinking, ‘Hey, what a great film’?
Contrast this with one of HMG’s advisers who went to see the film and cam away thinking, ‘Hey, what a great idea!:
Tony Blair is to announce plans to put up to half a million children deemed at risk of becoming criminals or getting into other trouble on a new computer register.
Teachers, family doctors and other professionals working with youngsters will be asked to name potential troublemakers whose personal details will then be placed on the database.
The new “identification, tracking and referral” system will allow the authorities to share information on vulnerable children, including their potential for criminal activity.
Alright, let’s get the obvious question out of the way, such as, exactly what does ‘at risk’ mean? What constitutes a ‘potential troublemaker’? Who decides these things and on what basis? Who guards the guardians?
Oh I daresay that there are answers (or, rather, great globs of state-management gobbledekook that purport to be answers) but they will almost certainly remain occluded behind the volumes of policy documents that filter through the ziggurat of state agencies charged with enforcing it all.
For the record, I denounce this but I do so merely as a matter of form. My stores of furious indignation have all but dried up leaving a residue of doleful resignation. And, to be fair, we’ve always had mechanisms for controlling the poor; this is merely the latest manifestation, albeit dressed up in the fashionable terminology of ‘caring and concern’.
The chink of light (well, a fissure really) is that this grand plan may not get off the ground at all and, even if it does, it will probably be a shambles. HMG already has far more laws, regulations, rules, plans, initiatives, schemes and regimes that it can possible see through or enforce and nothing they announce nowadays is likely to work as intended or at all.
Still, it will keep a few state bureaucrats busy for a few more years and that is probably enough.
If you like your music with a positive, pro-technology and pro-future outlook, ZIA is the band for you.
ZIA has gigged successfully in the competitive New York City scene for nearly a decade. They have had their Rite of Passage: a review by The Village Voice. They developed a following and produced a number of excellent recordings. You can download a bunch of tracks from their web site and order any of the discography.
ZIA is 1990’s music, full of sythesizers and strange instruments. If you aren’t a cultural “old fart”, you’ll love it. Even if you are, you may still love the subject matter. They talk about settling Mars, going back to the Moon, winning the X-Prize and about the simple yearning of all us spacers… to get off this frigging planet. True, ‘filkers’ cover some of the same ground, but they and their material are not suitable for a Lower East music venue. Kids who haven’t even looked up at the seven or so stars in the nightime sky of Manhattan can drink and party to ZIA.
Full disclosure: I’m not exactly unbiased since I know the writer, Elaine Walker, and work with her in the National Space Society. Remember her name. Someday she’ll be running an industrial conglomerate in space.
ZIA performance at 1999 International Space Development Conference
Photo: D. Amon, all rights reserved
PS: I understand Elaine is moving out of NYC, so I don’t know what is happening with the band. Watch their web site. I’m sure the information will show up there.
On the face of it this is good news for those of us who don’t want Britain to join the Euro:
The pro-single currency campaign, Britain in Europe, faces an exodus of staff, including the expected departure of Simon Buckby, the man who runs it.
The resignations have been prompted by frustration at the Government’s failure to take the lead on euro entry and a sense that the campaign had “lost its direction” after the Government’s assessment of its five tests for entry in June.
But there is a bit more to it than a campaign for something bad getting into a mess, which on the face of things would obviously be good. After all, this is a report from the Independent, which is not exactly anti-Euro.
Until recently, pro-Euro-ites have been paralysed by their belief that they ought not to say anything too critical of the Blair regime, on account of the Blair regime being so popular. But now the Blair regime is getting less popular. So now, pro-Euro campaigners need to separate themselves from Blairism. If they already want to, they now can.
The crisis has prompted the board of Britain in Europe to try to distance itself from the Labour government and return to its roots as a cross-party alliance.
It is felt the campaign will be better able to put its point across if it is not seen as a Blairite organisation, afraid of taking the lead where the Government will not.
Arguably, the reason why the case against British involvement in the Euro has been put even as forcefully as it has – you can argue about how forcefully that is, but at least that case has been put – is that the people putting this case have not bothered themselves about what effect this might have on the popularity of the Conservatives, there being no Conservative popularity to affect. They have just plugged away, communicating as best they could with the actual people. If anyone accused them of splitting the Conservatives in the process, they have just said: So? The pro-Euro people now look as if they are being pushed by events into doing the same smarter thing themselves, which is actually to argue their case in public, something which they have been notably reluctant to do for about the last thirty years, with the prevaricating results that they now so belatedly lament.
The reason why this pro-Euro organisation is now in difficulties is because it has been over-run with Blairites, who have been more concerned with keeping the Blairite policy of masterly Euro-indecision in place than they have been concerned with questioning that policy. But now their formerly willing – or just resigned to their Blairite fate – footsoldiers feel able to be publicly pissed off at all this Blairite vacuity, as they were formerly not able to be, and are leaving. Hence the “crisis”. This may weaken Britain in Europe, but it will probably strengthen the campaign for Britain adopting the Euro.
The point is, there is now liable to be a much more vigorous public campaign saying that Britain ought to adopt the Euro, instead of merely the endlessly repeated claim that it is going to anyway, so what’s the point in arguing about it?
Which could be rather a pity. Because once these people decide to take part in the Euro-debate, there is at least the possibility that you will win it, and actually persuade enough British people to be in favour of it, as enough British people presently are not.
According to the new FBI statistics, violent crime in the US just keeps falling. It’s down 50% in the last decade.
“Right to carry” laws also became very common in the last decade. There couldn’t possibly be a connection could there?
This has obvious White Rose relevance:
Tony Blair is to announce plans to put up to half a million children deemed at risk of becoming criminals or getting into other trouble on a new computer register.
Teachers, family doctors and other professionals working with youngsters will be asked to name potential troublemakers whose personal details will then be placed on the database.
The new “identification, tracking and referral” system will allow the authorities to share information on vulnerable children, including their potential for criminal activity.
It will be an extension of the child protection register which, at present, is restricted to listing the names and addresses of children who are vulnerable to physical and sexual abuse.
Professionals will be encouraged to include other factors, such as the likelihood of teenage pregnancy or the risk of “social exclusion”, in deciding which children should be monitored.
I think the scary thing about this is the combination of the precision and reach of a computer database with the subjectivity of some of the judgements concerning “potential” that are stored on it. Plus: Who gets to look at this database, and what decisions do they make in the light of the opinions collected in it?
The criminal law, in contrast, is (or ought to be) about what you have done, not about what someone merely thinks you might do.
But as so often here, I report, but can only speculate about those implications that we all need to think about. Perhaps others can be more definite.
I have several items in my list of ‘stories to watch’ on the Iraq campaign. The silence on two of them has been deafening. They are dogs ‘that didn’t bark’.
- What is the story on the Iraqi Salman Pak training facility? That is where an old Boeing 707 airframe was seen from overhead photography. Ground truth reports said it was used to train terrorists in the fine art of hijacking. What has been found there? Why hasn’t it been reported on? Why hasn’t someone from the army of Baghdad news correspondents been out to the suburbs to tell us?
- Where in hell are those ships? You know the ones I’m talking about. Osama’s fleet. In March we heard how they were floating around the world’s oceans and changing name and flag in mid voyage. Other reports suggested they might carry weaponry Saddam wanted both preserved and not found.
The latter seems to have slipped entirely into the black world. Did a Navy Seal team board and sink them with all hands dead?
Stories don’t go away in the blogosphere. They aren’t forgotten. They’ll keep popping up until satisfactory answers are found. Perhaps someone in ‘big media’, someone with resource enough for real intelligence work, can dig for the facts.
The truth is out there.
I read an article over on Fox News which does as a good a job explaining media bias as any I’ve seen.
Just over a decade ago, the US and the EU conspired to conduct what has proved to be a very successful war against low-tax jurisdictions and banking secrecy. Under a fig-leaf of a campaign to eradicate ‘drug-dealing’ and ‘terrorism’ (but truthfully to maintain the integrity of their various state-welfare arranagements) they employed a combination of legislation, diplomacy and outright bullying to effectively hobble (and, in some cases, shut down) the Western offshore-investment industry.
As expected, the EU went further in this war than the US where the ‘anti-money laundering’ regime metastasised into a ludicrous campaign against what they called ‘unfair tax competition’.
Well, now the chicks are coming home to roost. Or, more accurately, they are flying the nest:
The world’s major private banks are beefing up operations in Singapore, anticipating that up to a trillion US dollars worth of offshore assets in Europe may be looking for a new home in the next couple of years.
Changes in banking secrecy and tax laws due to take effect in the European Union from 2005 are expected to encourage offshore investors in traditional havens like Switzerland and Luxembourg to start moving their money to other centres.
Singapore, with its stable political system and excellent infrastructure, is seen getting a big share of this money.
“We have estimated that from Europe about a trillion plus could be highly movable without too much difficulty,” said Roman Scott, vice-president at the Boston Consulting Group (BCG). “Some of those guys are going to say; ‘I need an offshore centre that’s not going to be squeezed down’.
All the European places are being squeezed. You can’t go into the US, so you suddenly start to look at Asia as attractive,” he said.
Western political elites are rather like heroin-addicts. No amount of argument, persuasion or reason will do anything to deter them from their narcotic fix.
Lessons generally have to be learned the hard way.
[My thanks to Dr.Chris Tame who posted this article to the Libertarian Alliance Forum.]
22 engineers and technicians died instantly in an explosion on the pad. This is the worst pad accident since the Nedelin disaster in Russia in 1960.
Since postings here today seem a bit thin on the ground, let me recycle a link which I’ve already featured on my Culture Blog, but which I think is interesting enough to make a posting for the mass media. (I originally found it at b3ta.com.)
I’m talking about this, this being a site which includes something I’ve read about a lot but never actually seen demonstrated with the relevant contrasts. I’m talking about the ancient and now technologically rejuvenated art of picture retouching.
The most striking is the picture you get to straight from the link, but there are lots of others at the same site.
Okay I admit it, at this point I did pause a bit to think of a political moral to stick at the end, a thing not needed on a Culture Blog. But I think there is one, concerning the degree to which cameras do or do not tell lies. Put it this way, I think maybe I’ll give this site a mention at White Rose as well. An awful lot of credence is placed these days on photographic evidence. What this before/after site reminds us is that photos are only as reliable as a way to tell the truth as are the people in charge of them. (You have only to think of Stalin’s graphics department.) As it gets easier to manipulate images, so our readiness to trust them ought to diminish.
This site shows what is the result of retouching. But does anyone here know how long it takes to do this kind of thing, and how difficult it is? And can all of it simply be done with Photoshop?
This afternoon my fellow Samizdata-scribe David Carr took me to watch his beloved Chelsea play Leicester City at football, at Chelsea Football Club’s home ground, Stamford Bridge, which is a walk away from the Samizdata HQ. He had a spare ticket, caused by the temporary absence in the USA of his usual Chelsea companion.
It was quite a day, if only because it was the first Chelsea home game of the season, and accordingly the first home game attended by Chelsea’s new owner Roman Abramovich, the mysterious and infinitely rich young Russian who has been spending money like water on new players. £50 million is quite a lot to you and me, but to him it is apparently small change. Who knows how he made his money? Certainly no one in the crowd today gave a damn. It was enough that he was spending a little of it on their team. Abramovich got the biggest cheer of the entire day. It occurs to me that owning football clubs have now replaced owning national newspapers as the preferred hobby of the Infinitely Rich.
The Chelsea supporters by whom David and I were surrounded took the whole thing desperately seriously. They showed most excitement (a), as you would expect, when the two Chelsea goals were scored, and (b) when the referee ever made a decision of which they disapproved, i.e. not in favour of Chelsea. It seemed to me that for these person, football had completely replaced politics as the focus of their ‘political’ enthusiasms, if you get my meaning. Which might have something to do with why the Super-Rich have switched from owning newspapers to owning football clubs. Both are the result of their fantasies of political power. No politician (or for that matter newspaper tycoon) would ever get a cheer nowadays like the one that greeted Abramovich today. → Continue reading: Chelsea 2 Leicester City 1 – thoughts on why football is so popular
The State of California has, I’d guess almost unnoticed, passed new financial privacy laws that require banks and other financial service providers to obtain their customer’s consent before passing or selling on their client’s financial details.
It shows that it is still possible to get legislators to pay attention to privacy issues, but, as this interview with the new law’s proposer, State Senator Jackie Speier reveals, you do have to be persistent.
Still, it’s good to see hard work paying off.
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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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