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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Paul Staines ponders the grim events unfolding in Liberia and wonders who is going to support what action… if any
The Left seems strangely quiet about Liberia. Bad things are happening in that inappropiately named land, Liberians themselves are calling for intervention – US intervention. Various European foreign ministries hint that they think US intervention might be a ‘good thing’.
The UN offices and food programs have come under attack form Liberian government forces. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan urges the Security Council to dispatch a multinational intervention force to Liberia to prevent ‘a humanitarian catastrophe’. Annan hinted a strongly worded letter to the Security Council president, that this should be led by the United States. He also said it should be authorised under chapter Vll of the UN Charter which permits the use of force to restore order. (Why didn’t we use that in Iraq?)
Even France urged Washington to take the lead on military intervention in Liberia. The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), which is brokering peace talks between the Liberian government and rebels in the Ghanaian capital Accra, has also urged the United States to take a leading role in the dispatch of peacekeepers.
French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, said during a visit to Ghana on Saturday that Britain and France had “assumed their responsibilities” in two of Liberia’s neighbours, Sierra Leone and Cote d’Ivoire, where they had led recent military interventions to halt civil war. Villepin said it was now time for the United States to do the same in Liberia, which was founded by freed American slaves in the early 19th century.
The Left here faces a tricky dilemma – unable as ‘anti-imperialists’ to ever give the US the benefit of the doubt they prefer, I suspect, to let Liberia go up in flames rather than sanction a US led intervention.
Paul Staines
Last week I posted a scan of a rather tattered magazine picture of Strom Thurmond surrounded by marshmallows on the stage of the CMU Skibo Ballroom, circa 1970.
It seems the original student photographer is one of our readers. This blast from the past duly reminded him of this classic image and he has sold it to Reuters. You can see a much better copy of Jerry Siskind’s photo there.
This is likely to lead to a lengthy exchange of do-you-remembers betwixt us!
Ever since the US implemented software patents, the EU has been determined not to be left behind. According to an item in Debian News:
“More on European Software Patents. An article at ZDNet UK says that the EU bureaucrats aren’t even considering the numerous anti-software patenting opinions out there. According to a well-connected lobbyist group, they have determined there will be patents, and the only question is what kind.”
Software patents are a very bad idea as many have discovered in the US. They put a fence around parts of mathematics. Even worse, the government guardians of the fencemaking are not familiar with the field and its’ literature and are vastly understaffed to boot. This has led to some gawdawfully silly (and economically destructive) patents being granted.
Within the last couple years BT tried to claim a patent in the US on hyperlinks1. This was shot down after a massive search by the open source community. It ended with the web publication of a late 1960’s lecture discussing the idea.
Virtually everything in well done programming is “obvious” when you get “there”, down to the core of the problem at hand. Two top programmers given a reasonable time to attack a complex problem will very likely find large sections of their work very similar if not almost identical.
A program in a well formed language is equivalent to a mathematical expression. Such expressions are in most cases transformable into each other.
The Debian News cited article can be found here
1 = 01/07/2000 NewScientist p017 “The Net Strikes Back: BT tries To Patent links”
American spy satellites have found what looks like an advanced nuclear testing range in North Korea, the Telegraph reports.
American intelligence officials now believe that North Korea is developing the technology to make nuclear warheads small enough to fit atop the country’s growing arsenal of missiles, potentially putting Tokyo and American troops based in Japan at risk, according to officials who have received the intelligence reports.
An intelligence assessment, which has been shared with Japan, South Korea and other East Asian nations, identifies a previously unknown range of the type needed to produce a nuclear missile warhead according to the New York Times. The new testing capability does not mean North Korea can actually build a small weapon, but it suggests that the North Koreans are moving to combine their two most advanced weapons projects: nuclear technology and missile technology.
As Telegraph points out such uncertainty leads to a further cause for alarm: the outside world’s reliance on remote sensors and satellite images to track what is going on inside the paranoid totalitarian state.
North Korea, unlike Iraq, has made no secret of its plan to develop nuclear weapons. Now, administration officials say they fear that the North is on the verge of producing five or six new weapons, some of which might be miniaturized.
“This would give them the range they never had before, and the chance to spread their threat far beyond South Korea,” said a senior Asian official, noting that about 60,000 American troops are based in Japan.
Without question, though, North Korea’s abilities greatly outstrip anything Iraq had in the last decade, and the North’s program is probably several years ahead of Iran’s.
The American food giant, Kraft, is taking a number of steps to ward off the threat it may be sued by obese folk claiming its foodstuffs made them so big. This comes in the wake of threats by an American man to sue various fast-food chains for making him so big.
Kraft, of course, is fully entitled as a private company to adjust its products as it wishes. It is probably a wise move. In the U.S., and sadly, increasingly also here in the UK, the idea that the consumer should adopt the posture of caveat emptor (let the buyer beware) is on the decline. We are increasingly told that we are all victims, passive suffers of the blandishments of big, evil, and mostly multinational corporations.
The idea of taking responsibility for your actions is dying out. We are on the way to all being treated like naughty little moppets in a creche.
And of course if we do still sneak into a fast-food joint for a big burger, there’s a chance our state nannies will want the evidence recorded on CCTV.
The Telegraph reports:
A woman who was strip-searched when she went to visit her son in jail asked five law lords yesterday to create a new law of personal privacy. Lawyers for Mary Wainwright, 49, from Leeds, hope the House of Lords will overturn decisions by lower courts that there is no right to privacy in English common law.
Mrs Wainwright visited her elder son Patrick at Armley Prison, Leeds, in January 1997. She was accompanied by her younger son, Alan, who suffers from cerebral palsy with a degree of mental impairment. Before the visit could go ahead, Mrs Wainwright and Alan were strip-searched for concealed drugs. The searches were more intrusive than was permitted by prison guidelines.
A judge in Leeds decided that their privacy had been infringed but this ruling was overturned by the Court of Appeal in December 2001. Three judges, headed by the Lord Chief Justice, held that there was no right to personal privacy in English law.
I don’t give two flying figs about Silvio Berlusconi’s business dealings be they murky or otherwise. All I know is that he is just about the only European political figure with personality:
Mr Berlusconi lashed out when socialist Martin Schulz accused him of an alleged conflict of interest over his Italian media empire.
Does this qualify as ‘lashing out’?
“I know there is a man producing a film on the Nazi concentration camps,” Mr Berlusconi said, “I would like to suggest to you the role of Kapo (guard chosen from among the prisoners) – you’d be perfect.”
Naturally this left all the po-faced EUnuchs clucking like a lot of indignant hens. Expect a draft directive on inappropriate insults any day now.
We’re all familiar with the popular cartoon caricature of Americans as gun-crazy cowboys who would shoot you as soon as look at you and peaceful, sophisticated, post-history Europeans who only need their directives to keep them safe from harm. In fact, I have lost count of the number of sneering British lefty journalists who prefix every reference to Americans with the words ‘gun-toting’ as a means of driving home the impression that they are dangerous, violent, atavistic non-communautaire people.
True? Well, probably not:
“Contrary to the common assumption that Europeans are virtually unarmed, an estimated 84 million firearms are legally held in the 15 member states of the EU. Of these, 80 per cent – 67 million guns – are in civilian hands,”
Good gracious! And to think that Tony Blair wants political union with these gun-loving maniacs!
Finland, with its strong hunting tradition, has the most legally registered guns in the EU at 39 per 100 people, the UK has 10 – one third of the German and French figures – and the Netherlands has two. Gun laws are tightest in the UK, the Netherlands and Poland, while France has more legal handguns than the Czech Republic, Denmark, Poland, England, Wales and Scotland combined.
Just one quibble: there are no legally held handguns in the UK at all so maybe France is not quite as awash with hand cannons as the article would suggest. Nonetheless it is clear that most Europeans have not, in fact, been gripped by the same anti-gun hysteria that has swept over Britain.
It is about time that some mainstream voices were prepared to challenge the absurd and iniquitous eco-fascist-inspired war against the motorist and, much to my surprise, that voice is emanating from the Conservative Party:
The Tories promised yesterday to raise the motorway speed limit from 70 to 80mph as part of a “fair deal for drivers”.
Tim Collins, the shadow transport secretary, said this was part of a set of reforms to be unveiled later this month.
They will include the removal of the bus and taxi lane on the M4 between Heathrow and London and speed cameras that trap motorists “unfairly”.
Unnecessary road humps and road tolls will be abolished. Some speed limits, through villages, for example, may be tightened.
Its a funny old world when the Conservatives are starting to make anti-establishment noises but that is what they are doing. I suppose it is symptomatic of having spent so long in the political wilderness that even they realise there is nothing to be lost by saying boo to a goose.
It is still a long way from the kind of radicalism that we need and it is not enough to cause me to review my poor opinion of them as an institution but I am prepared to give them credit where a little bit of credit is due.
Reason’s Hit and Run blog links to this article in the Washington Post about companies who promise not to sell information about you. And they keep their promise. They don’t. They rent it instead.
Original link here.
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For as long as I can remember I have been an enthusiastic supporter of the principle of road pricing, for much the same reasons that I favour the pricing of any other scarce and desirable product or service. Reduce queueing caused by underpricing. Encourage the construction of better roads, more suited to the desires of drivers, more creatively designed. Pricing will enable road ownership, and that will enable better environmental policies, because owners will then be responsible for environmental impact. Etc.
However, there are two different ways of doing road pricing, both of which have big advantages and big disadvantages.
One. Anonymous Charging. Charge each vehicle to go past certain barriers, physical or electrical. Either the man at the wheel chucks some coins down a shute, or the place has a machine which debits the vehicle as it goes by, by debiting a box on the vehicle which has been filled up with money, gas meter style.
Advantage: Anonymity! The vehicle user is no more spied on than he is when he buys a pair of socks in a shop. If the vehicle user consents to the transaction tracking inherent in the use of a credit card, fair enough. But money remains an option, and money is freedom, because money is anonymous. (I remember once a trader in a street market shouting at me: “You don’t ask me where I got the stuff I’m selling, and I won’t ask you where you got your money.”)
Disadvantage: Cumbersomeness. Every barrier becomes a huge Thames Flood Barrier for cars. Installing machines in cars is complicated and expensive, and what if different cities use different systems? A different box for each system? Until the same system wins a battle of the gauges, it’s a nightmare either of delay or of incompatible equipment. → Continue reading: Total Surveillance versus Anonymous Charging: the road pricing dilemma
When Hong Kong was handed over to Communist China by the British state, to much joy and acclamation by credulous Chinese and Gweilos alike, the totalitarian gerontocracy in Peking pronounced soothingly that Hong Hong would retain its relatively liberal order under a doctrine ‘One nation, two systems’.
Tens of thousands of people have marched in protest at a planned anti-subversion law aimed at an EU style ‘harmonizing’ of Hong Kong law with that of the rest of Communist China. One nation, one system it would seem.
…the government is pushing through the national-security legislation, known as the “Article 23” measures, too quickly, and without enough public debate. The proposal is in many ways an attempt to bring Hong Kong’s laws regarding subversion, treason, sedition and the theft of “state secrets” in line with China’s.
Well it comes as no surprise to me that these patent lies only took six years to be revealed. I look forward to hearing the people who rejoiced at the surrender of Hong Kong’s people to China recanting their folly. I am not holding my breath however.
The Chinese way of dealing with effective protests
(WSJ link via Combustable Boy)
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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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