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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Have you had a bad day? Got a problem? Is your life a mess? Are you sick? Lame? Poor? Lonely? Unemployed? Or are you just fed up, listless and overwhelmed with feelings of exhaustion and hopelessness?
Well, you can always vent your frustrations by blaming your troubles on George W. Bush. Why not? Everyone else does. For everything. From perished pensioners in Paris to stubbed toes in Sarajevo to nosebleeds in Nairobi there is not a misfortune or a twist of cruel fate anywhere on the face of this planet that cannot be laid squarely at the varnished door of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
And this is all because that current occupant of the most important office in that august building went and ‘tore up the Kyoto Treaty’; the modern equivalent of snapping a ju-ju stick. Thus has Mr.Bush incurred the wrath of the angry spirits.
Of course, George Bush did not ‘tear up’ the Kyoto Treaty at all (which is a shame because it deserves to be torn up). But that doesn’t matter. We’re not dealing in truth here, we’re delving the murky, opaque depths of mythology and superstition. George Bush is for the modern left/green axis what the devil was for medieval peasants.
Perhaps Mr.Bush (or his advisers at any rate) is aware of this and decided to take advantage of the situation. After all, if you’ve been cast as the devil, you may as well go ahead and live up to the role:
The Bush administration plans to open a huge loophole in America’s air pollution laws, allowing an estimated 17,000 outdated power stations and factories to increase their carbon emissions with impunity.
Critics of draft regulations due to be unveiled by the US environmental protection agency next week say they amount to a death knell for the Clean Air Act, the centrepiece of US regulation.
The rules could represent the biggest defeat for American environmentalists since the Bush administration abandoned the Kyoto Treaty on global warming two years ago. But the energy industry welcomed them, saying they were essential for maintaining coal-fired power stations.
Now a word of caution here: the link is to the Guardian so the story may not be true at all. It may just be the product of their febrile imaginations (Next week: “Bush adds fresh babies to Whitehouse menu”). However, I certainly hope it is true and not just because it would mean good news for US industry and prosperity but also because it drives home the old lesson that being hated has its definite advantages. At a stroke, George Bush will have lifted a millstone from the neck of his country without doing the slightest harm to either his reputation or chances of re-election.
The devil may not have all the best tunes. He just has the freedom to whistle them.
Here’s an article by Tom DeWeese of NewsWithViews.com, entitled Total Surveillance Equals Total Tyranny.
First three paragraphs:
In the name of fighting terrorism a new kind of government is being implemented in Washington, D.C. We are witnessing the birth of a powerful multi-billion dollar surveillance lobby consisting of an army of special interest groups, Washington lawyers, lobbyists, and high-tech firms with wares to sell.
The personal rights of American citizens, protected until now by the Bill of Rights, are the farthest thing from their minds as they seek to fill their pockets while enabling government to monitor and control our lives to a degree unheard of prior to September 11, 2001. This army seeks riches as it pushes for laws and regulations to spy on and control the lives of law-abiding Americans.
The Government Electronics and Information Technology Association (GEIA) reports that there are more than 100 federal entities involved in forging the largest conglomeration of government-private contractor interests since the creation of the Pentagon. GEIA represents hundreds of corporate members seeking to cash in on the Homeland Security-citizen-surveillance-spending spree.
The counter-terrorist-industrial complex?
For reasons best known to themselves the proprietors of the British tabloid newspaper the Daily Mail have elected not make the contents available on-line. As a result I cannot link to this story, so thanks are due to Dr.Chris Tame for posting it to the Libertarian Alliance Forum:
I went to a cafe in central London to meet a stranger.
I handed over £1,300 and a mere 48 hours to assume the new identity of ‘Odette Hinault’ complete with fake EU passport, driving licence and French ID card, together with a genuine National Insurance number. Within a day of becoming ‘Miss Hinault’ she had opened a bank account, registered with a GP, obtained a phone number and had claim forms for housing allowances and council tax benefits.
There was nothing to stop her plugging into an entire system of state handouts that would have more than repaid her £1,300 outlay within weeks.
So says a Daily Mail reporter called Sue Reid who went undercover (presumably) and succeeded in obtaining all manner of forged official documents.
Two of the many oft-floated (and disposable) justifications for establishing a national ID card system are that it will a) stop illegal immigration (or, at least, make it a lot harder to do) and b) stop cheats from defrauding the welfare state (or, at least, make it much harder to do).
Ms.Reid’s investigations prove pretty conclusively that both claims are manifest rubbish.
Anyone who isn’t exhausted by this subject, will be after slogging through the comprehensive job of heavy lifting over at a spin-off post on the Smallest Minority blog.
This is the post I would have put up if I wasn’t so damn lazy. Many statistics, and a heaping helping of good sense. Extra bonus points for the Jesse Jackson quote!
One of the premier rent-seekers in the US, Jesse Jackson, appears to be off his game. Jesse has long run what amounts to a protection racket, in which he threatens to invoke the anti-discrimination laws and boycotts against any company that doesn’t pony up to one of his phony charities.
To take one gruesome example from the book: In 1981, Mr. Jackson struck up a “covenant” with Coca-Cola in which the company not only agreed to change overseas policies but, more to the point, provided profitable distributorships to black businessmen–including Mr. Jackson’s half-brother, Noah Robinson, later convicted of racketeering, drug trafficking and murder-by-hire.
However, Jesse has made a number of gaffes and missteps in recent years that may have undercut his little empire.
His shot at the membership policies of the Augusta National Golf Club had flown straight into a water hazard. His complaints about the jokes in the movie “Barbershop” were dismissed as raving. And it wasn’t so long ago that he was outed for his close and fruitful relations with a female staff member of his Citizenship Educational Fund, a scandal that occasioned a trip into the political wilderness that lasted most of a weekend. Finally, Kenneth Timmerman’s “Shakedown,” published last year, detailed his lucrative intimidation habits, with Mr. Jackson threatening charges of racism unless corporations adjusted their policies and gave “willingly” to various causes.
The sooner Jesse disappears from the public stage, the better off we will all be. Let’s hope that day is coming soon.
This, linked to by the ever caring and concerned Dave Barry, gives a whole new meaning to the word freedom:
sacfree makes your sac free! In former times there were boxershorts or slips. Today there is sacfree, the first boxerslip of the world. sacfree brings you pleasant liberty (“bringt dir angenehme Freiheit”) and defines your necessity.
Briefly: A new dimension of comfort and liberty for your balls. And … sacfree is sexy.
Any ladies or gay gentlemen care to comment on that last claim?
Foreigners mishandling their private parts and the English language. Samizdata never lets you down.
But, watch out when some Germans want to define your necessity.
In a post about a month ago, I detailed the rubber-gloved rise of the rubbish inspectors, the latest bunch of useless bureaucrats to feast upon the fat of Britain’s once glorious but increasingly manacled land.
It seems their army is still on the march to its place in the sun of the regulatory annals of glory. As part of the excellent Stephen Robinson’s Free Country series, Mr Robinson details how these rubbish inspectors are now to increase their own powers of land rulership.
Now that the problem of fly-tipping has grown exponentially over the last few years, due to idiotarian government policies on landfill taxes and fridge disposal, instead of the government finding fly-tipping miscreants and protecting people’s property, it is going to punish these injured parties if they don’t foot the bill themselves to enforce the government’s policies against fly-tipping. Which is simply splendid, don’t you think?
(Fly-tipping is the process where expensive-to-dispose-of waste is dumped illegally upon other people’s property.)
So where you used to think you paid taxes to the state, so they would provide a minimal level of defence against your property, and your person, against ne’er-do-wells, now they’re going to punish you for the actions of these other low-lifes, and still charge you for the police, without actually giving you the benefit of their protection. No doubt as well as having to set up CCTV around your property, for the government’s eye-spy benefit, you will have to pay to have any fly-tipped rubbish on your land sent to government waste disposal centres. Where obviously you will be asked to pay your full quota of landfill taxes, on someone else’s rubbish. And if you don’t do this, the government will, of course, send the boys-in-blue round to make you.
Doesn’t this remind you of anything? A mafia protection racket, for instance?
All round the government is a winner. It gets more cameras, for free, and more revenue, for free, and the UK’s citizens are wrapped up in yet another layer of interfering regulation, and still HMG can sit smugly around whatever’s left of the Kyoto protocol table to claim that Her Majesty’s Government is the font of all light and all goodness. Doesn’t it make you proud to be British?
Here’s a description of a helpful and amusing mapping system that they’ve developed in Amsterdam, linked to by David Sucher.
For the exhibition Maps of Amsterdam 1866-2000 at the Amsterdam City Archive Waag Society together with Esther Polak have set up the Amsterdam RealTime project.
Every inhabitant of Amsterdam has an invisble map of the city in his head. The way he moves about the city and the choices made in this process are determined by this mental map. Amsterdam RealTime attampts to visualize these mental maps through examining the mobile behaviour of the city’s users.
During two months (3 Oct to 1 Dec 2002) all of Amsterdam’s residents are invited to be equipped with a tracer-unit. This is a portable device developed by Waag Society which is equipped with GPS: Global Positioning System. Using satellite data the tracer calculates its geographical position. Therse tracers’ data are sent in realtime to a central point. By visualizing this data against a black background traces, lines, appear. From these lines a (partial) map of Amsterdam constructs itself. This map does not register streets or blocks of houses, but consists of the sheer movements of real pepole.
When the different types of users draw their lines, it becomes clear to the viewer just how individual the map of amsterdam can be. A cyclist will produce completley different favourite routes than someone driving a car. The means of transport, the location of home, work or other activities together with the mental map of the particular person determine the traces he leaves. This way an everchanging, very recent, and very subjective map of Amsterdam will come about. If you spend (or should we say move) a good amount of time within the ‘ring’ of the Amsterdam A10 Highway, you can apply here
for becoming a testperson during rhe testing and development-stage or for becoming a participant during the time of the exhibition. Participants receive a print of their personal routes through the city, their diary in traces.
As Sucher says, this could be
…the first step to charging for street use. Or more.
My attitude to charging for street use is: if it’s your street? … But: “Or more.” Exactly. The whole point of the Internet is that we don’t each of us, separately, any longer have to do our own personal filing. The great Giant Filing Cabinet in the Sky can do our filing for us, and we can share each other’s files. There are huge advantages to this process. Huge.
But what are the disadvantages? Who else gets to look at your “personal” files, and what use to they make of what they learn? The White Rose agenda is, among things: the disadvantages of the Internet. What if they price we pay for this thing ends up being a whole lot more than just the price of getting connected to it?
White Rose: Depress yourself about the future of technology.
Just a reminder to anyone planning to tour Britain, this bank holiday weekend, by rail. Well, the bad news is, you can’t. The good news is that the cricket’s on.
That useless subsidy-addicted creature of government, Network Rail, has decided to shut down large parts of the rail network in order to create road chaos, sorry, in order to carry out essential engineering work. For instance, if you’re a small bear from Peru, with a fondness for marmalade, hoping to stowaway on a Great Western locomotive from Bristol to London, this weekend, don’t do it. Otherwise a whole series of books about you in the future will have to be named ‘The Adventures of Reading Bear’. Paddington station is closed.
If you’re old enough and stupid enough to remember voting for Mr Tony Blair, in 1997, on the back of the glittering promise that he would sort out Britain’s transport system, you’ll by now have realised that we only get what we wish for. For he’s well and truly sorted it, by turning it into a snake-pit! Why doesn’t the fool just hand it over to the Transport Blog, who’ll make a much better fist of it?
I myself shall be attempting to navigate a path, to Victoria, to take a train to Worthing to visit my mother-in-law (Reginald Perrin fans, please note, I am not making this up.) Let’s hope it’s not as warm and humid down in the Tube, this afternoon, as it was this morning on the Bakerloo line, where I literally thought I was going to liquefy. Yes, literally become a puddle of once human flesh.
I shall be imbibing a ridiculously over-sized bucket of iced gin and slim-line tonic, the moment I descend the steps at Worthing station, if I should get there before midnight. My advice to everyone else who can, is stay at home.
For those poor blighters, like me, having to travel: Good luck, everyone!
The latest estimate of deaths from the French heat wave is up to 10,000 or so. This raises a number of issues.
- How reliable is this number, of course, and what does it really mean? Most of the dead appear to be elderly and infirm in any event, and many would likely have been carried off by the next stressful event in their lives. Nonetheless, the number appears to reflect “surplus mortality” over a comparable period, so lets take it at face value for now.
- What does this say about the state of the housing stock in France? We are told that apparently the French are unacquainted with modern air conditioning, apparently because their weather is so mild. I seem to recall during the recent Tour de France coverage a great deal of commentary about how the heat is always an issue during this event, so I wonder about this. I also lived in the American South for several years without air conditioning, so I can assure that it is possible, and that in fact lots of people have, and continue to do so, without dying.
Nonetheless, in the US central air conditioning, never mind window units that can cool a single room, is standard equipment on most new houses regardless of where they are located (leaving aside Alaska). I live in Wisconsin, in the northern tier of states, and I can assure you this is true, and that many older houses, including mine, are retrofitted for central air. It is true that Chicago suffered some excess deaths during a heat wave a few years ago, but those were confined entirely to the very poorest parts of the city.
Permit me to draw a connection here between the better condition of America’s housing stock, its stronger economy and higher GDP, and its relative lack of government interference in the economy.
- What does this say about the state of socialized medicine in France? This is a nation, after all, that prides itself on its socialized medicine and other social services, but it would appear that these are precisely what failed to prevent so many presumably preventable deaths. It turns out that the nursing homes were grossly understaffed during the August holiday period.
Allow me to suggest a connection between the chronic understaffing of nursing homes and other health facilities in France and incentives to not hire created by all the worker protection legislation there. Allow me to further suggest that the practice of allowing employees to take vacations during August is a reflection of a culture that is focussed more on the needs of the employees than the customers, a classic symptom of either government employment or suppressed competition. Allow me to suggest that the sluggish response to the changed conditions of the heatwave is typical of top-down government-run systems.
→ Continue reading: Heatwave
Yesterday, there was an article in the tabloid section of The Times (which Samizdata does not link to, although the author of the article has also written this book on the subject), on the treatment of the Uighur people in the Xinjiang province in far western China, the point of which was that this (Muslim) ethnic minority have for a long time been treated appallingly badly by the Chinese authorities, that the world largely doesn’t know about this, and that this is bad.
This is all entirely true, and the Chinese authorities are indeed a nasty bunch of thugs, but the point I am getting to is something else. For three quarters of the way through the article I find the following statement
Behind every protest at this treatment, Chinese officials see only the sinister hand of Muslim fanatics, backed by foreigners, plotting to split the motherland. And the screw has tightened since President Bush’s declaration of a war on terror after September 11.
Is it me, or is there something deeply odd about the way this has phrased? Rather than a crackdown occurring as a consequence of September 11 itself, a dreadful atrocity caused by Muslim fundamentalist fanatics, it is somehow the consequence of the fact that President Bush and America has responded to this. (America is maybe guilty of neglect in this case, but somehow implying that it is in any way George Bush’s fault is surely stretching things somewhat). And the fact is the same organisations rooted in Saudi Arabia that funded and spread the fanaticism that led to September 11 are also doing their best to spread that same fanaticism to every Muslim in the world, and very legitimate grievances such as this one are a tremendous source of recruits. Regardless of how badly they have treated their ethnic minorities (and in this case the answer is “extremely badly”) I do understand why the Chinese are worried.
The article goes on
History shows the Uighurs to be pacific, and lax in their religious observance. No doubt there are today some religious fundamentalists inside Xinjiang. No doubt inflammatory literature, not to mention weapons, is being smggled in. Certainly there are militants (especially amongs the young urban unemployed) both inside and outside who would like to overthrow Chinese rule.
But Islam should be seen as the vehicle, not the cause, of Uighur grievances, and separatism as a mark of despair at the lack of citizens’ rights or a share in their own future
This is all largely true as well. The trouble is that it is also true about the forms of Islam traditionally practiced throughout large portions of (non Middle-Eastern) Asia. Islam in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Phillippines and various other places is traditionally relatively moderate and often mixed with pre-Muslim practices. However, the flow of oil-money from Saudi Arabia to the rest of the world has led to a spread of fundamentalism and terrorism to many of these places, and has made it very difficult for the opponents of such fundamentalism to speak out. Wherever there is a grievance, this money and this influence has largely had an influence akin to pouring petrol on a fire. A war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, which was fighting another very legitimate grievance, somehow evolved into the Taliban.
To be truthful, the situation of the Uighurs is sufficiently wretched that not much will make their situation better short of the complete collapse of the People’s Republic of China. The developed world’s neglect of this particular situation is certainly less than admirable. But a further spread of Islamic fundamentalism to that part of the world may well make it worse, and certainly won’t make it better. And a great many things we can do to minimise that spread are, in my opinion, worth it. And given that the fundamentalism has spread and is spreading mostly from Saudi Arabia, anything that can be done to reduce our dependence on Saudi Arabia and anything that can be done to isolate Saudi Arabia is likely worth it, including the invasion of and occupation of Iraq.
Mr Schwarzenegger has been avoiding stating his proposed policies, to reduce California’s debt mountain, in his play for the California state governorship role, and he’s had a public row with Warren Buffet, his economics adviser, on property taxes. But even if just for Friday entertainment value, check out these latest quotes:
“I feel the people of California have been punished enough. From the time they get up in the morning and flush the toilet they’re taxed.”
Zing!
“I teach my children not to spend more money than they have. That’s what I will teach Sacramento.”
Bosh!
Combine those sound-bites with some he delivered a few days ago:
“I am more comfortable with an Adam Smith philosophy than with Keynesian theory.”
Splat!
“I still believe in lower taxes — and the power of the free market.”
Yowzer!
Ok, until someone can actually nail him down on his policies, we must reserve judgement on the larger-than-life mega-star, especially as he keeps neatly side-stepping the really difficult questions on taxation with a “we can never say never” line. But if you retain even the slightest Churchillian belief that democracy is the least bad of all of the systems of government, things are becoming increasingly interesting in the Golden State.
And Mr Arnold “Arnie” Rimmer, of the future mining space ship Red Dwarf, is certainly getting plenty of newspaper headlines to cut out and keep, to impress all of his friends with!
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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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