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]
|
In a move which will be the effective creation of a state ID card, Dr Liam Fox, the Conservative health spokesman, has said the next Conservative government will introduce a health entitlement card for all UK citizens.
Thanks, Liam. It’s just what I’ve always wanted.
These cards will either be difficult-to-forge, requiring a trip to a police station to get your iris scanned, or they will be easy to forge, requiring a used tenner in the heroin-dealing under-the-table pub of your choice, to get hold of an effective fake one.
And given that the black market works free of most government interference, except for the bribes necessary to pay off police enforcers, expect even hard-to-forge ID cards to come on the black market for under a tenner within a couple of years.
So in order to garner a few short-term votes, Dr Liam Fox is willing to foist a new hideous layer of expensive bureaucratic control upon us, which will be easily circumvented by everyone except by the guiltless and the honest. Though I’m sure that when it is, an even more expensive and intrusive ID card system will be the solution proposed by the next Conservative government, once again to ‘protect’ the blessed NHS.
Don’t prevaricate, Liam. Just abolish the NHS, and have done with this Jurassic-Age monster.
Though I think I’m rapidly approaching the Carrite position, where just like the pigs in ‘Animal Farm’, the difference between New Labour and the Conservatives is becoming ever more difficult to discern.
Until even recently I held great hope for the Conservative party, but over these continuing issues of ID cards I am losing my belief.
I blame that Murray Rothbard. His books are just too enlightening.
Not that there is any Deep Libertarian Significance to this story, but no opportunity should be missed to revel in the humiliation of a bureaucrat.
Superintendent of Schools Wilfredo T. Laboy, who recently put two dozen teachers on unpaid leave for failing a basic English proficiency test, has himself flunked a required literacy test three times, The Eagle-Tribune reported Sunday.
. . .
Laboy, who receives a 3 percent pay hike this month that will raise his salary to $156,560, recently put 24 teachers on unpaid administrative leave because they failed a basic English test, which has been required since voters passed a law last fall requiring English-only classrooms.
[State Education Commissioner David P.] Driscoll said he is willing to give Laboy more time to prepare for another retest.
”He’s not a native language speaker, so a formal test is something he needs to prepare for,” Driscoll said. ”It doesn’t mean anything now. It will mean more as time goes on because there’s an expectation that he’ll pass.’
I suspect the really scary part of this is that the Lawrence school district had 24 teachers who lack basic English proficiency. The other scary part is that the failure on multiple occasions to demonstrate basic language skills “doesn’t mean anything” if the individual in question is already enfolded in the forgiving arms of the civil service.
Someone has recently set up a syndicated account for Samizdata.net over on LiveJournal… if XML feeds are something you are interested in, check it out!
David Farrer comments here on the case of a someone who may be sent to jail for using a mobile telephone to record and transmit proceedings in the Perth Sheriff Court.
Apparently they don’t like it so much when we use technology to keep tabs on them.
If anyone doubted that the libertarian ‘vibe’ is seen by many as powerful and attractive, then the fact so many people who represent its antithesis keep trying to hijack the term to mean ‘someone opposed to liberty’ should make it clear that the word ‘libertarian’ is hot, hot, hot (i.e. much as the term ‘liberal’ within the Anglosphere was hijacked when it was hot and which has now come to mean ‘illiberal’, which is to say, socialist).
I have argued before that Libertarian Socialism is an oxymoron… well the same applies to Libertarian National Socialism. But then given that National Socialism and Socialism are just tactical variants within the same old statist collectivist class of political philosophy, it is hardly surprising the arguments as to why one is absurd to call itself libertarian applies equally well to the other.
The only real difference is that the Nazi variety of socialist collectivists just have better tailors and a worse press. The use of the term by overt Nazis is really no more bizarre than its use by Noam Chomsky, that socialist apologist for Pol Pot and several other of the world’s collectivist mass murderers.
This story in today’s New York Times is fascinating:
Alex Malo was born with several feet of his small intestine hanging outside his body. The loop of intestine had slipped out through an abnormal opening in his abdomen while he was still developing in the womb. The tight opening pinched the intestine, cutting off its blood supply and killing the tissue. The day Alex was born, doctors operated to remove the dead stretch of intestine.
Which, to cut a long story and Alex Malo’s small intestine short, caused big problems. If your intestine is too short, you can’t eat.
But Dr Kim had already been thinking about this. Here’s his idea:
Surgeons make a row of slits along the dilated stretch of intestine, alternating from one side to the other and stapling shut the edges of each side of the “V” that results. They use a small surgical stapler, which both cuts and staples. What results is a zigzag tube that is much longer and skinnier than the original distended bowel. The surgeons named the operation the STEP procedure, for serial transverse enteroplasty.
This had to be tested on animals first, and “a million forms” had to be signed saying yes, it could kill Alex but please do it anyway. They did. It worked. Read the whole thing.
There are many lessons to be learned from this story. I suggest four:
One: the New York Times still has its uses.
Two: testing on animals has its uses.
Three: people with names like “Kim” are making a huge contribution to life in America.
Four: you need the right institutional setting to do clever things.
Dr. Kim said he had not discussed the new operation with the surgeon who told him a decade ago that it would never work.
“You have to have the right environment,” he said, “where people are open to new ideas and really try to push the envelope with innovative surgery, for this kind of crazy idea to eventually make it to the bedside to treat children with disease.”
Entrepreneurship is just as much a medical thing as a more conventionally “business” thing, or, to put it another way, running medicine rather like a business, as the USA is famous for doing, can also do a lot of good.
I don’t know the details of how well or badly Britain’s National Health Service works in circumstances like these, but I doubt it would have been such a good environment for Dr Kim, or for Alex Malo.
Instapundit links to this story, and quotes a fellow lawyer who alerted him to it that it shows you shouldn’t automatically disbelieve a client who says he doesn’t know how some porn found its way onto his hard drive.
A man accused of storing child pornography on his computer has been cleared after it emerged that his computer had been infected by a Trojan horse, which was responsible for transferring the images onto his PC.
[XXXX XXXX] … was taken into custody last October after police with a search warrant raided his house. He then spent a night in a police cell, nine days in Exeter prison and three months in a bail hostel. During this time, his ex-wife won custody of his seven year old daughter and possession of his house.
In a world where simply being charged with a crime causes millions to presume some degree of guilt, and gives personal enemies their chance straight away to move in for the kill by making use of other bits of the legal system, then the decision merely to prosecute becomes a sentence in its own right.
Virginia Postrel has a small piece on her blog about the civil liberties implications of the war on terror. (She also links to this Reason article by Jacob Sullum). Essentially her point is that if you give the authorities arbitrary and unaccountable powers of arrest (or to violate civil liberties in other ways) in order to fight terrorism, then eventually these powers are going to be used on other people as well, particularly the opponents of whoever is in power. Therefore, accountability and openness is crucial.
A ‘legal opinion’ about the incident that made our Jonathan Pearce “mighty queasy”.
The adverts to UCMJ and the U.S. Army Field Manual only prove that hostage taking is illegal under U.S. law, but don’t prove that the action in question here was in fact a hostage taking.
So far I’m not convinced that there was a violation of either international or U.S. law — not in spirit nor letter. The only thing I’m convinced of is that lots of people are wanting to make a big deal out of an incident that doesn’t deserve the attention.
Via Instapundit
We all know the old saying: there’s lies, then there’s damnable lies and and there’s government education statistics:
Leading independent schools are preparing to abandon GCSE, one of the central props of the Government’s tottering exam system.
Pupils at leading schools commonly take 12 subjects, many of them a year early, and up to 90 per cent of the papers are graded A* or A.
“It’s like Boy Scouts collecting badges,” said Tony Little, who has just completed his first year as head of Eton. “One has to ask what the educational value of it is.”
Methinks that Mr.Little is being polite. I suspect that what he really wants to say is that an exam system that is so ‘dumbed-down’ as to ensure that virtually nobody fails is about as much practical use as a chocolate teapot. Handing every schoolchild lots of certificates to wave around doesn’t mean that they have actually been educated.
The elite schools’ decision to break ranks without waiting to see the details of the Government’s plan to replace GCSE and A-levels with a national diploma will alarm Charles Clarke, the Education Secretary.
It suggests the schools have no faith in the Government’s claim that academic standards will be protected from further debasement.
And they are right not to have any faith because the government is not concerned about education it is merely anxious to present lots of impressive statistics in order to convince everyone (including themselves) that children are being educated instead of merely processed. This isn’t education it’s a puppet show.
However, it is difficult to hide the sordid truth from the people whose business it is to actually help young people learn lots of things and it is gratifying to witness some of them breaking rank. Hopefully this is the start of a trend as people who truly value education begin to realise that it is far too important and precious to be left to the government.
Perhaps I should be more disturbed than I am by the possibility that our Prime Minister appears to have been beset by holy visions:
Tony Blair knows it is one of the most delicate of subjects. When asked about it he squirms and tries to change to a more comfortable line of inquiry. But quietly the Prime Minister is putting religion at the centre of the New Labour project, reflecting his own deeply felt beliefs that answers to most questions can be found in the Bible.
The Observer can reveal that Blair is to allow Christian organisations and other ‘faith groups’ a central role in policy-making in a decisive break with British traditions that religion and government should not mix.
Once again, life imitates art with Mr.Blair appearing to have lived up the Private Eye magazine caricature of him as a trendy, preachy Vicar.
All chortling aside (to be stored up and deployed at a later date) I have no way of proving that this isn’t strictly a matter of conscience. I can’t prove it isn’t, but I simply don’t buy it. The timing is far too suspicious. For me it has got all the hallmarks of a frantic search for a new moral underpinning by a politician whose quasi-evangelical ‘government for everyone’ zeal first had the sheen rubbed off of it and then had the shit kicked out of it. This is not so much an act of piety as an act of desperation.
But perhaps I am being more cynical than I need to be. They say you should never judge a man until you walked a mile in his shoes. Right now, I wouldn’t want to be in Mr.Blair’s shoes. His personal popularity is plummeting and the government he is supposed to be steering just cannot seem to do anything right anymore. Every which way he turns he sees enemies, backstabbers, plotters and sneering journalists asking questions he just cannot answer. Faced with that vista who wouldn’t want to retreat to the comforting certainties of that old-time religion?
I know I am not the first to say so but it does look increasingly likely that Mr.Blair is groping for the door marked ‘exit’.
From the Telegraph yesterday:
Closed-circuit television cameras are to be installed in every classroom at a school for the first time in Britain in a development that has raised alarm among parents and teachers.
CCTV will operate throughout the new school, King’s Academy in Middlesbrough, when it opens in September. The cameras are intended to make it easier to monitor and control bad behaviour by pupils.
The school says they will also watch over expensive computer equipment and will assist staff by providing evidence to clear teachers if they are falsely accused of abuse or assault.
This last is to counter the fear among the teachers that the cameras will also be used to spy on them.
King’s is the latest of the Government’s trumpeted city academies, funded jointly by state and private money. It will specialise in business and enterprise. Although CCTV is used for security reasons around many schools, King’s is the first to use it throughout classrooms.
Manchester city council is now seeking funds to install cameras in five schools as part of a discipline crackdown. A CCTV network of 40 to 50 cameras, which would cover the average school, would cost about £16,000.
Not for the first time, my reaction to being told the cost of some surveillance kit is: that’s cheap. Soon, if they want it to be everywhere, and they do, it will be.
|
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