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Least you think all we talk about is politics here on Samizdata.net. I just got through watching a DVD of Dog Soldiers and it is proof positive that you do not need a famous cast of ‘Big Names’ or vast budget for special effects to make a rather good horror B-movie.
The script will not win any awards for originality but as anyone who knows British squaddies could tell you, the characters are well presented and credible: the slang and comportment are perfect. Also they react as one might expect when suddenly confronted with a seemingly unbelievable yet manifestly undeniable situation… which is to say they do not (initially) believe that they are being stalked by honest-to-goodness werewolves, but they do not deny the obvious either when they find themselves wading through gore and intestines.
Excellent stuff… if you are a connoisseur of B-movies, then your hard earned pounds/bucks/€uros could be far worse spent than renting or purchasing this dirty little gem of a movie. I have seen flicks ten times worse than this which cost one hundred times more to make.
Waahhhoooooooooooooooo!
Never mind the ‘luck of the Irish’, what about the luck of the lawyers? I ask you, has there ever been a group of people so consistently blessed by the fickle finger of fate? Somebody ‘up there’ must like them, that’s for sure.
‘Not so’, I hear you cry? Well, how’s this for proof? No sooner has the legal profession turned its formidable guns on the fast-food industry than, flash-bang-whallop-wham-as if by magic, some learned scientists turn up with a whole bunker full of ammunition:
Women with a high-fat diet may increase their risk of developing breast cancer later in life, say researchers.
A study of more than 13,000 women from Norfolk found that women who ate the most saturated fats – such as those found in chocolate snacks and fast food -were almost twice as likely to develop cancer, compared with those who ate the least.
I am sure it is nothing more than coincidental. Honestly. Really. But, you must surely concede, the timing could not be better.
And is that lucky or what?
The political storm over the government’s ‘Iraq dossier’ seems to have taken a rather macabre twist:
Police searching for the weapons expert suggested by the government as the possible source for a BBC story on Iraq say the body they have found matches Dr David Kelly’s appearance.
In fact, the TV news is now reporting that the recovered body is that of Dr.Kelly.
Let the conspiracy theories commence.
No free man shall be arrested or imprisoned or disseised [dispossessed] or outlawed or exiled or in any way victimised, neither will we attack him or send anyone to attack him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.
– The Magna Carta (1215)
My dear pal Brian Micklethwait was not exaggerating; Tony Blair is, indeed, in deep trouble.
Judging from this article in the Independent the assault on his premiership has just been ratcheted up to a whole new level:
Supporters of the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, have launched an extraordinary attack on Tony Blair, portraying him as a “psychopath” and “psychotic”.
Blair loyalists are furious about a string of hostile articles about the Prime Minister in the current edition of New Statesman magazine, which is owned by Geoffrey Robinson, a former Treasury minister and a close ally of Mr Brown.
Another article in the magazine is headed “What is the point of Tony Blair?”, while a third declares: “The question of Tony Blair’s sanity can no longer be avoided.”
This is pretty grim stuff. It is one thing to disagree with a Prime Minister’s policies but quite another to denounce him as a ‘psychopath’. I cannot recall any serving Premier being publicly subjected to quite such a vicious attack. And from members of his own party, to boot!
Mr.Blair may have been warmed by the adulation he has received in Washington but back here in Britain, he has got serious problems.
This week New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg signed into law a provision that transfers liability for personal injuries on public sidewalks from the city to the adjacent building owner. In addition, a companion bill the mayor signed will require property owners to carry liability insurance that provides coverage for sidewalk injuries.
This legislation transfers liability for sidewalk accidents from the city to the property owners who already have the duty to keep the sidewalks in good repair.
So let me get this right. You do not own the bit of the pavement in front of your house/flat. Nevertheless, you are responsible for keeping in it good repair, clean it of snow, ice and other obstructions to pedestrians. At your own cost. For the Public Good. And you are also liable for anything that happens to your accident-prone, trigger-suing compatriots.
Call me old-fashioned but this is outrageous. The concept of being responsible for something you do not own and have no property right to is not only non-sensical but goes to the heart of your personal freedom. The New York City imposes a cost on you without any corresponding choice to dispose of that responsibility. They make you clean, repair and pay legal costs for the pavement whether you like it or not, in the name of Clean and Safe Pavements. You are made a slave to the passing pedestrians or rather the Public in general, which of course is a patriotic and public-spirited thing. That sounds familiar…
Oh, and now you are also forced to buy insurance to pay for the liability you have no choice in incurring. It seems that New York Mayor sees property rights his way.
It is a little known fact but Britain is a world-leader in the manufacture and distribution of paranoia. We even export it.
For most of the time our public officials are hard at work busily churning out the stuff for both the domestic and foreign markets. But, what happens when one health-panic runs headlong into another? Well, the whole machine just grinds to an embarrassing halt:
A council has forbidden pupils to apply sunscreen in school – in case other children suffer an allergic reaction.
Cancer Research UK, which launched the Sun Smart campaign to warn of the dangers of the sun, said it was “amazed” by the policy.
Manchester City Council says it is following health and safety guidelines.
Pity the poor child, stuck out on a limb, while two different nannies squawk at them with two entirely conflicting demands. Maybe the nannies could solve the problem (and do everyone a real favour) by just dropping dead from worry.
I have ‘acquired’ a British army ‘source’ currently stationed in Basra. I decided to share some of the information on the blog as it comes from a rather different perspective than media reporting. It may not be as topical or ‘political’ as the headline news but I hope you will find it interesting:
This is my first letter from lovely Basra, city of a thousand exotic smells. I’m actually really enjoying myself so far. This country is seriously bizarre. Take the kids. Up to the age of five they are so cute it’s unreal. Every one of them could star in an Oxfam advert. They all look pretty, they all have huge grins, and they all seem really pleased to see us. “Hey meester! Hello meester!” And yet they are living, literally, in shit. In the poor areas the streets run with sewage. Saddam never bothered to put in a sewage system for these areas – or rather he didn’t maintain the one the British put in. I have never been so grateful for a poor sense of smell.
Most of the people are really friendly. True, in the poor areas the kids throw bricks at us when we are in vehicles, but that’s just their idea of fun(!) It’s really fun driving around the city at night or in the evening, standing up in the back of a Landrover with the hot air blowing past as you cruise around. Mind you, you have to be careful because the Iraqis drive like madmen. I think maybe the Americans in Baghdad have confused normal Iraqi driving with suicide bombing tactics. They just cut up everyone, driving is based on aggression, and they drive both ways on either side of the road. They just take the shortest route between two points regardless of what is in the way, so it’s not surprising that virutally every vehicle has a broken windscreen and looks like a junkyard refugee.
The only exception to the bad driving is when our armoured vehicles are on the road. Those they treat with respect. But Landrovers they now cut up like anything else. We are trying to get the traffic cops back to work, but they’re frightened to come back, and they aren’t generally much use when they do.
But patrolling around the streets is fascinating. It’s just really interesting to see a completely different culture, a totally different way of life. And it’s far more interesting than Northern Ireland, because here we can really do stuff. If we think a house had weapons in it, we can just go in and search. The other day, on a tip off, we collected an RPG launcher. The follow on search found a load of mortar bombs. And that’s just routine here.
Otherwise I have been in my office stuffing my head full of information on SADR, SCIRI, INC, INA, Imams, tribes, crime gangs, politicians and every other madman around here. They all seemed to be called some combination of Ahmed Mohammed Al Unpronouncable. Arabic names will be the death of me, not least because they have about nine different spellings. But I’m getting there – I know far more about the politics of Basra than any sane man would ever want to. In another letter, I’ll tell you about WMD sites and arresting looters.
Barely a working day goes by when I don’t read some nauseating editorial in some left-of-centre organ warning of the ‘dangers’ of becoming more like America and demanding even greater integration into Europe.
Europe, you see, is more attuned to concepts of ‘social justice’ and therefore kindler, gentler and more humane. A place where those vulgar ‘market forces’ are tamed and brought under ‘democratic control’. Yes, Europe is an altogether more civilised model of society.
Except that I think we now have pretty incontrovertible proof that the European ‘model’ is actually a long, drawn-out extinction event:
Fertility rates across Europe are now so low that the continent’s population is likely to drop markedly over the next 50 years. The UN, whose past population predictions have been fairly accurate, predicts that the world’s population will increase from just over 6 billion in 2000 to 8.9 billion by 2050. During the same period, however, the population of the 27 countries that should be members of the EU by 2007 is predicted to fall by 6%, from 482m to 454m. For countries with particularly low fertility rates, the decline is dramatic. By 2050 the number of Italians may have fallen from 57.5m in 2000 to around 45m; Spain’s population may droop from 40m to 37m. Germany, which currently has a population of around 80m, could find itself with just 25m inhabitants by the end of this century, according to recent projections by Deutsche Bank, which adds: “Even assuming (no doubt unrealistically high) annual immigration of 250,000, Germany’s population would decline to about 50m by 2100.”
This is what happens when children are taxed out of the family budget. And it gets worse:
A recent report from the French Institute of International Relations predicts that, by the middle of the century, the EU’s GDP will be growing at just over 1% a year compared with more than 2% in North America and at least 2.5% in China. The EU, the report gloomily concludes, faces a “slow but inexorable ‘exit from history’ “.
I really do recommend that the whole article be read in order to fully appreciate that Europe’s political classes are standing hip-deep in merde. Nor are there any easy solutions to which they can turn. Radical reforms are politically impossible and even cranking up the immigration rates by several orders is not going to save them. If the host population is dying out then the newcomers are not so much ‘immigrants’ as replacements; the demographic equivalent of a blood transfusion. Out with the old and in the with new. Still, there is a possibility that the ‘new’ Europeans might have taken on board the object lesson and realised that socialism is suicide. Perhaps that is the solution after all.
So Europe will probably try to muddle through its demographic problem. There will be some pension reform, a bit more immigration, more family-friendly policies, higher taxes, growing fiscal problems for many governments and slower economic growth. With luck the European Union will avoid or postpone a really huge economic crisis. But the political and economic renaissance of Europe that was predicted at the European convention is likely to be stillborn.
Yes it really was as recent as a few months back that my ears were assailed with all those triumphal, confident proclamations that a ‘United Europe’ was soon going to overtake the USA as an economic power. I laughed my arse off. Now I almost pity them.
The future is not bright. They don’t need shades.
You know its something of a rum-do when you see an arch-capitalist like me denouncing a proposed privatisation:
The national DNA database containing more than two million samples could end up in the private sector under Government plans to sell off the Home Office Forensic Science Service (FSS).
And denounce it I most certainly do though I am obliged to add the important qualification that this is not really a ‘privatisation’ it is just a state licensing operation. The company that ends up running the database will have its ‘stock’ provided for it by the government who will also be its only (or most valuable) customer.
Still that won’t stop the owners and shareholders of the company from lobbying the government to extend police powers to extract DNA samples from anyone unfortunate enough to cross their path (and probably even those who do not).
It also raises the infuriating possibility of the police not just demanding a DNA sample from you but subsequently charging you £40 for the privilege of taking it.
This is one of those stories that Richard Littlejohn would classify under “You Couldn’t Make It Up”. I’m sure White Rose will have more to say about it than this one posting. For now I hardly have time to do more than flag it up before going to bed.
The national DNA database containing more than two million samples could end up in the private sector under Government plans to sell off the Home Office Forensic Science Service (FSS).
This is toxic. You gather information about people without any consent (because being arrested isn’t that kind of deal) and then you turn the management of the resulting database into a business. Objections? Where do you start? How long do we have?
Call this whatever other names you want, but don’t you dare call it “pure” capitalism, or the “extreme” free market.
Last night, the proposed sale threatened to become the most controversial since the privatisation of the air traffic control system.
I’ll say.
White Rose seems to have missed this (from the BBC on Wednesday):
A group of peace protesters has launched legal proceedings against Gloucestershire police, claiming they used anti-terrorism laws to prevent demonstrations against the war in Iraq.
The complaints centre on RAF Fairford, where American B-52 bombers were based during the conflict.
None of the protesters who demonstrated at the airbase were charged with terrorism offences but they say their human rights were breached.
The pressure group Liberty is calling for an inquiry into the use of section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 at the base.
Officers were granted powers under the legislation to stop and search vehicles and pedestrians in the area near the base between 7 March and 27 April.
But they were obviously all really dangerous people, yes? Absolutely.
One of the people the group says was stopped under the Terrorism act was 11-year-old Isabelle Ellis-Cockcroft, whose father David Cockcroft is taking legal action claiming a breach of human rights.
Isabelle told the BBC: “We were just walking along the road and they stopped us. I did not have a full body search because there was no woman officer there.
“They asked what was in our pockets, wrote down our descriptions and checked a backpack and a bike we had with us.
“They said they were stopping us under the Terrorism Act, but I’m not a terrorist.”
I guess you just can’t be too careful.
Don’t get me wrong. I personally don’t care at all for peaceniks, and I especially dislike them when they have hyphenated surnames. Isabelle Ellis-Cockcroft should be swooning over plasticated pop musicians in preparation for doing It-Girl Studies at Roedean, not demo-ing outside an airbase.
But I will defend the right of hyphenated peaceniks to demonstrate without being arrested as terrorists to the point of putting up a posting about it on White Rose.
Thanks to Chris R. Tame and the Libertarian Alliance Forum for flagging up the story.
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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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