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]
|
All governments love boasting about their achievements and HMG is no exception. A particular favourite boast for the current lot is how many jobs they have created since they came to power. Sounds good, doesn’t it.
But there is a whole world of difference between job creation and wealth creation. In fact, the two things can be mutually exclusive:
Labour has hired 344,000 extra people to work for the Government since it took office, with the state now employing 5.3m people, or one in five of the workforce, according to figures released yesterday.
Until Labour was elected, the government payroll had fallen for 15 years, mostly thanks to the privatisations of the 1980s, but that is now being reversed by a massive public spending spree funded from tax rises.
Tony Blair and Gordon Brown are overseeing a hiring bonanza. Hundreds of thousands are joining the public sector, especially in the National Health Service, where 160,000 more staff have been taken on. The NHS now employs about 1.3m people, reputed to be more than any other civilian organisation in the world apart from the Indian railway.
If those people working in the shrinking private sector want to know exactly why they have to hand over more of their income and savings every year to their government, I suggest that they look here for an answer.
This from the BBC:
Eavesdroppers, including stalkers and jealous spouses, are listening in on hundreds of thousands of private conversations in Britain every week because of a legal loophole, BBC News Online has discovered.
Telephone tapping without a valid warrant is illegal under both the 1998 Wireless Telegraphy Act and the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000.
The law relating to intrusive surveillance devices – bugs – is less clear.
But it is legal to trade in taps, bugs and covert cameras, which explains the myriad websites, mail order businesses and spy shops.
And so on.
I’m a libertarian and I don’t quite know what I think about all that. I mean, I’m in favour of trades of all kinds, including lots of trades that other people aren’t in favour of. I think, for example, that it ought to be legal to buy a small and sneaky camera, if you want to buy one and if someone wants to sell you one. It’s a bit like guns. It’s what you do, and in this particular case it’s also where you do it, that matters, not the mere owning or buying of the thing itself.
But my attitude to posting on White Rose is: if it’s of interest and relevance, stick it up. I’m trying to give the customers here, that is to say the people the editors here want to be the customers here, what they want. No doubt they’ll straighten me out if I’m doing it wrong.
Tony Martin, a farmer jailed five years for the “crime” of shooting two burglars – but only managing to kill one – has been set free.
His case is so notorious even the present government is considering changes in the law. On tonight’s news there was intimation of a new law to ban nonsense suits by criminals against defending homeowners. There may even be a broadening of the UK legal definition of self-defense.
Under current standards in the UK, self-defense is almost non-existent, so anything is a vast improvement.
Lift a jar or three to the heroic farmer Martin tonight! Later, when you visit the bog and return them from whence they came, do so in remembrance of the unmanned and unfortuneately surviving second thief.
Killing the Terrorism Information Awareness program is very much akin to killing a vampire. You can stick a stake in the heart of a vampire and it will die. But pull that stake out, and it will spring back to life.
– Steve Lilienthal in his CNSNews.com commentary Protecting Law-Abiding Citizens
Declan McCullagh has a commentary on CNET News.com about privacy in the post-9/11 US. He concludes:
It’s unclear what will happen next. One possibility is that Americans honestly may be so fed up with privacy invasions that they demand that their elected representatives do something. The tremendous interest in the national do-not-call list supports that idea, as does the conspicuous lack of congressional support for the Justice Department’s proposed sequel to the USA Patriot Act.
Another possibility is that the report on Sept. 11–prepared by the two most clandestine committees in Congress and released last week–may lead to more efficient surveillance techniques. Two key findings say the National Security Agency did not want others to think it was conducting surveillance domestically, so it limited its eavesdropping, even against spooks or terrorists inside the United States. The report concludes that the NSA’s policy “impeded domestic counter-terrorist efforts.”
What the report doesn’t say is what should be done about terrorism–and whether that would swing the privacy pendulum back in the other direction.
Veteran space tourist Dennis Tito is ready to invest in a suborbital spaceship… but he is worried the FAA is going to regulate them like aeroplanes. He and others are worried this would kill the infant industry:
Jeff Greason, president of the Mojave, Calif.-based XCOR Aerospace, testified before the panel that holding suborbital vehicles like the one his company has in development to the same standards as airplanes would ensure that commercial space flight never gets off the ground.
In aviation, Greason said, the FAA’s focus is on keeping planes in the sky. When it comes to rocketry, the FAA assumes that the launch vehicle will fail and places most of the regulatory burden on ensuring that adequate measures have been taken to safeguarding people on the ground.
Greason called on lawmakers to help ensure that reusable launchers are treated as rockets, not as aircraft, as some in the FAA would prefer.
“If we insist on perfect safety at the beginning of the industry, we will get it, because no one will ever fly.” Greason said.
Perhaps one of our readers will drop in and expound on this at length. (wink, wink, nudge, nudge Jeff)
This link from Xcor points to the written testimony.
I had a strange experience last week, whilst camping on the Pembrokeshire peninsula in Wales. And no, it wasn’t the 16 hours of continuous rain on Thursday which almost flooded us out; you come to expect that kind of thing if you go camping in Wales. No, it was the strange and magnificent monastic retreat of Caldey Island.
For those who’ve never been to the Tenby area of Little England, in Wales, this is a small island just off the coast which is privately owned by a small group of Trappist monks. These Cistercian Trappists are an offshoot of the Benedictine monks, with the Cistercian monastic order being originally formed in 1098 by St. Robert of Citeaux, who thought the Benedictines were getting a bit lax and cavalier in their ways (for example, by failing to maintain a rigid vow of silence, every day, between sunset and sunrise).
And boy, are these Cistercian monks serious, even in modern times! They get up every day, at 3:15am, for a silent vigil, pray a further six times during the day, and then go to bed at 8pm. They eat no meat, except on either holy feast days, or if they’re ill, and follow vows of poverty, chastity and religious obedience. But after reading Murray N. Rothbard’s The Ethics of Liberty, the week before I packed my estate car’s roof rack with tent, wellies, and waterproofs, I was struck by the almost Rothbardesque island nature of this tiny sliver of Terra Firma. → Continue reading: The monks of Caldey Island
More drug war chaos:
A prosecution based on a huge undercover police operation in which £15 million was laundered then returned to suspected drug dealers was thrown out of court today.
In a lengthy ruling that allowed 10 defendants to walk free and left the taxpayer to foot an enormous legal bill, a judge branded the “honeypot” operation as nothing less than “state-created crime”. He said it was “massively illegal”, and, in the case of two suspects, amounted to entrapment.
That’s the Guardian. I couldn’t find anything about this at the Indy or the Telegaph, but that could just be me.
Here’s another for the Samizdata Wonders of Capitalism collection.
In her intro at the top of her blog, Natalie Solent says:
Politics, news, libertarianism, Science Fiction, religion, sewing. You got a problem, bud? I like sewing.
Me too. Not to do it mind, but when I go to Natalie, I hope to be reading about it every so often. But it’s mostly about politics, news, libertarianism, etc.
However, yesterday there was a sewing item.
Enough of politics …
Good, good.
… I have got me an overlocker.
What’s that?
It cost more than my last car but two.
No, not what did it cost? What is it?
These beasties are to proper sewing machines what the microwave oven is to a proper oven – the quote comes from Jan Saunders of Sewing for Dummies fame, and it’s true. An overlocker can’t do some things that a proper sewing machine can but it does its more limited range of tasks much faster and, once you have one, the change in the relative cost in effort of each action inevitably changes the whole style of cuisine, sorry, sewing. For benighted readers who do not know what an overlocker is, take off your T-shirts. Yes, very nice. Now turn the T inside out and look at the seams. They were sewn, bound and cut in one operation by an overlocker. The fluffy, softer thread used is distinctive, and overlockers are better at not distorting stretchy fabrics than an ordinary sewing machine is. In the opposite direction, they are also better at not puckering up thin, fray-prone “brittle” fabrics. I have already had the guts to make a child’s dressing-up cloak from some ridiculous shiny stuff that I had kept for years waiting for the day when I got my Black Belt.
This is the …
… Janome MyLock 644D for the hordes of sewing-geeks who infest this blog like swarming locusts.
Yes, we have swarms of those too, because we have swarms of everything. But for the benefit of the more typical Samizdata reader, Mr Natalie helps out:
My husband has kindly translated sewing geek language into Engineering: the overlocker is to the ordinary sewing machine what the vertical mill is to the lathe; you can do almost anything on a lathe including vertical milling – but a mill does the job so much better.
Serious point about capitalism, excellence of, to end with: Some of you may not have understood all of what Natalie, or even Mr Natalie, says about her new Janome MyLock 644D overlocker. I think it is clear that she likes it, but I for one can’t claim to be entirely sure about all the detail of exactly why. But with capitalism, this doesn’t matter. All that is required in a free market is that the people involved directly in a deal understand what they are doing.
In particular, no politicians need get involved, or feel that they have to understand what is going on, before matters can proceed satisfactorily. Imagine how much more primitive and miserable life would be if politicians did have to understand everything and supervise everything.
Well, you don’t have to. Samizdata is full of reports about just such circumstances.
Take Cuba, a classic “The Boss has to understand everything” kind of place. Paul Marks and David Carr weren’t agreeing yesterday about what will happen next, but between them they describe what a grim and ghastly and easily understood place Cuba now is very well.
And for an example nearer to home of circumstances ever more directly supervised by the politicians and consequently ever more shambolic, look no further than this posting which I also did here only yesterday, about Britain’s ever more state controlled examination system.
Our Revered Leader Perry de Havilland has been telling us in conversation that our postings here are better than they were in the early days of this blog. I’m sure I hope so, and I believe that something similar may also apply to David Farrer over at Freedom and Whisky.
His latest posting is a particularly choice item, based on an equally choice story in the Sunday Herald, about a potential collision between ramblers in Scotland and trains in Scotland, caused by an actual collision between “Right to Roam” legislation and the decision to bring charges of Corporate Manslaughter against six of Britain’s railway ex-bosses for an earlier prang.
The railway infrastructure has been taken out of the hands of shareholders and into the safekeeping of selfless (sic) public servants. Surely this kind of mix-up shouldn’t occur. Don’t tell me that there’s something wrong with socialism! In the meantime the local council is forcing open the gates over the tracks and Network Rail is locking them up again.
The folk at Network Rail are – wisely – looking out for number one:
“If people are serious about crossing live railways, the safest way is by underpass or bridge and somebody has to fund that – and it’s not going to be the railway because it’s not our responsibility. The responsibility must either rest with councils or central government.”
Dave Fordwych, the Sunday Herald man, thinks both policies are foolishness, but David has the answer to the problem:
I think that a solution may be found if the Secretary of State for Transport, Alistair Darling, has a quiet word with the Secretary of State for Scotland who is, er, Alistair Darling.
And I thought that Rod Liddle, in his recent Spectator piece about the Kelly Affair had been joking about …
… the day that Tony Blair announced his embarrassing and botched Cabinet reshuffle, the one where people suddenly found out that they were simultaneously Secretary of State for Transport and Scotland.
David adds a personal recollection to the effect that Darling seems inclined already towards talking to himself.
Funnily enough, the only time I have ever seen Mr Darling, my own MP, was on an aeroplane flying from London to Edinburgh and, yes, he was talking to himself.
“Joined up government” is what David calls his posting. You can’t get much more joined up than this. But, it doesn’t seem to be working very well.
The third of a series of interesting although irregular ‘letters‘ from Our Man in Basra.
I promised to tell you more about the situation here. I will tell you loads when I get back. It’s absolutely fascinating, like a real time experiment in political theory. Except it’s a bugger for the people we are ‘experimenting’ with.
Basra now is effectively an anarchy, a sea of conflicting power groups. As I briefed the CO and the Bde Comd (ed. Commanding Officer and Brigade Commander), you can’t have politics without first having security, and you can’t build security through political systems. Interestingly enough they both agreed. We are trying to police Basra as if it was somewhere in England, policing by consent. That does not work after thirty five years of dictatorship and in a country where people think democracy means “the people will decide”.
The worrying comparison we now get is with Saddam Hussein (SH). After the 91 uprising Basra was far worse damaged than anything we did to it – we barely touched it. Yet in one month he had basic amenities back because he shot looters. After three months we still haven’t got reliable electricity or clean water, because we try to arrest them. Every Iraqi I have met agrees on two things, no matter what group they come from:
You must shoot more people Not imprison, not arrest, you must kill them. Otherwise they will not stop.
The other thing is they all hate SH and BP (Ba’ath Party) with a passion. Consider it from the point of view of the looters. You live in shit, your life expectancy is low, there is – at the moment – no economic activity you can improve by, and your only experience is of a gangster economy, so without influence you have no chance. So why not loot? After all, the CF (Coalition Forces) won’t shoot you. You have to really work at it to get shot by the British. If we catch you we now hand you over to the Iraqi (IZ) judicial system. Except there isn’t one yet, not really, and all the Judges are corrupt or threatened. If you’re caught you spend about two nights in jail and get released. And while you are in jail we feed you, shelter you and give you water. This is like trying to deter crime in London by banging shoplifter up for two nights in the Ritz. So the locals think we aren’t serious about crime. Result is we are losing support.
The looting is incredible – they have done 99% of the damage to this city. The only reason the electricity isn’t fully back on is because they have been ripping up the electricity cables, burning off the insulation, melting down the copper and selling it on the black market. They light fires at either end of the cable to short it out first. Occasionally they get it wrong and get electrocuted, but if you live like they do it’s a perfectly rational risk to take.
The result is that people are turning elsewhere for security, away from us. Everything hangs on security, all infrastructure, all economic activity, everything. We don’t provide it, we just physically haven’t got enough troops. (We could do it if we shot people whenever they upset us. Everyone would stop upsetting us then, and we could build all the other security forces, i.e. police and judiciary, keep them safe from intimidation and build authority. This is a statement of fact, not a policy suggestion.)
The IZ police are corrupt, frightened, incompetent or all three, so people turn elsewhere. The tribal Sheikhs never used to have very much power in Basra because, unlike the countryside, the population was so mixed up. But now only the Sheiks are willing to kill your enemies or intimidate the police etc, so people go to them for help. This is a self-generating snowball effect, so we are creating a sort of tribal mafia, although not necessarily dishonest (though many are).
In my next letter I will give you a potted description of the breakdown of Basra society. And I do mean breakdown.
Apologies for the sparse style but I have my ‘yellow brain’ on all the time. That’s like a ‘green brain’ only cooked by the heat…
Editor’s note: An account of his recent visit to Basra by the now famous Salam Pax.
Interesting news emerges from the crumbling Blair regime, of Downing Street’s education supremo, Andrew Adonis. Charged with the task of persuading Britain’s higher earning tax serfs to abandon the private education sector, to throw their children into the mind-numbing morass of the Guardian-reader dominated state “education” sector — I prefer the term “serf-provision” sector — it appears Mr Adonis is himself considering the hideous evils of going private.
In a plausibly deniable way, he’s thinking of sending his son to the fee-paying, and German government subsidised, Deutsche Schule. The words self-deluding and fraudster spring to mind. But coming from a government already boasting the services of Lord Falconer, the crony who failed to become a Labour MP because of his honest refusal to stop using private schools, and who reached the heady heights of ministerial office despite the wretched idleness of several hundred elected Labour backbenchers, it may instead reveal the often hidden mental pattern of the rest of our lords and masters.
For in their world, they are our noble shepherds, and we are their humble sheep. They lead and we follow. And do not the sheep need corrals, or comprehensives, to pen them in, to teach them how to eat grass, grow wool, and be sheared? And do not the leaders, and their offspring our future leaders, need the marble Platonic academy at the top of the hill, to teach them the ways of their glorious guardianship of our otherwise free-market wolf-infested lives? They deserve it, for all the christian sacrifices they’ve made, taking from our backs all of our painful burdens of choice and freedom, and bearing them on our behalf, as Jesus did with his cross. Does not the word “Adonis” itself mean “Lord”, in biblical Greek?
And what better an academy than a German-speaking school, to prepare the new aristocracy’s new baby aristocrats with a correct language specification for the century ahead, in an EU world based upon the magnificent Rhineland economic model? A private education subsidised by the taxpayers of Britain, who toil to pay your inflated wages, and the taxpayers of Germany, who your son will one day rule over as part of the expansive rentier establishment? Marvellous. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer hypocrite.
|
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