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The Ministry of Defense released a paper for public discussion (pdf) on missile defense today. Mr. Hoon would like the public debate on the issues to begin now because deployment will take many years here from the start of such discussion.
The media reports claim there is currently no threat. I was surprised not even Mr Hoon pointed out how even an existing short range ballistic missile can be fired from a tramp steamer outside of the UK territorial waters.
I hope to find some mention of this in the aforementioned document which I have not yet had a chance to read.
You may email your comments to the UK MoD on this subject at:
Missile-Defence@mod.gsi.gov.uk
Dec. 3, 2001 Prototype Kill Vehicle
launch from Mecklin Island.
Courtesy US DOD
Self-defence is not necessary because we have the police to protect us, right. That’s their job. That’s what we, the tax-payers, pay them to do. So, we can all sleep safely in our beds at night, knowing that the agents of the state will keep us safe from those who would do us harm.
That’s the theory; this is the practice:
“Police have launched an inquiry into why it took officers an hour to respond to an emergency call from a Jewish couple who were the victims of a terrifying burglary at their Southgate home.”
Well, as long as there’s no ‘hate speech’ involved, it probably isn’t a real emergency.
“Officers eventually arrived at 6:40am, long after the intruders had driven off with their haul in the couples’ two Mercedes saloons.”
Laughing their arses off, I’d wager.
““Although I am disgusted with the police who should have been there to help us, they have been very supportive and efficient since. It was just a break-down in communication and it shouldn’t have happened.”
‘It shouldn’t have happened’!!. Oh, that’s all okay then. As long as this kind of thing ‘shouldn’t happen’, we can all go back to sleep again.
The French economy is deteriorating, so much so, that the French themselves admit that the growth of 0.2% between July-September 2002 is worse than expected, according to Nicolas Claquin, economist at CCF bank.
“We can expect [the weakness] to continue at least until the start of 2003, confirming our forecast of gross domestic product growth of 1.4% next year. The government’s growth target (2.5%) for 2003 is too high.”
So far not a surprise deserving a mention on this blog – it is the ability of the French to manage an arrogant spin of their worsening economic situation that is astounding:
“The figure confirms that France is not immune from the slowdown affecting our European partners and the United States.”
Perhaps Mr Cavalier, a Credit Lyonnais eurozone economist, failed to notice that despite the other countries’ economic problems the French economy is doing still worse than Germany and Italy in the last quarter and far worse than the UK and the US.
Jul-Sep 2002
UK +0.8%
Germany +0.3%
Italy +0.3%
France +0.2%
US +1.3
But, of course, let’s blame it all on the Americans.
It’s healthy to have a small amount of paranoia, but these guys have more than their fair share. Regrettably they no longer produce material but that said there is still nine years worth of the funniest (and sickest) cartoons I have ever run across to while away a lunch hour.
I think the terror most people are concerned with is the IRS1.
– Malcolm Forbes, when asked if he was afraid of terrorism
1 = for non-US readers, IRS is the Infernal Internal Revenue Service, the United States’ theft enforcement arm
One of the things I like about America, is that Britain is far too stuffy, po-faced and politically-correct for this kind of thing. (Media player required)
[My thanks to Samizdata reader Boris Kuperschmidt for the link]
[Update: the link seems to have been withdrawn]
The excellent Reason magazine is starting a blog called Hit & Run, which will be up and running first thing Monday (US time). The new blog will be presided over by Reason’s new Web editor, Tim Cavanaugh, formerly of the much-lamented commentary site Suck.com.
I recommend a longish piece that Michael Jennings has just put up about the truly extraordinary Hollywood machinations which resulted in the three Lord of the Rings movies getting made, by an “insane bearded New Zealander”. I haven’t seen any of these movies, but I enthusiastically concur with this concluding observation:
… At least one insane bearded New Zealander is now insanely rich. And I think a world in which insane bearded New Zealanders can become insanely rich by making ludicrously over-ambitious movies is better than one where this is not the case. …
Quite so. The insane New Zealander is obviously quite a character, but even more extraordinary is the person who produced these movies, someone called Bob Shaye. It’s a real feet-in-the-gutter but eyes-on-the-stars story.
I took the liberty of looking at the Jennings site meter, to see if saying this here could be expected to make any difference to anything. Apparently, it might. I think Jennings deserves a lot more readers than he’s now getting.
Last week I watched a typical British Channel 4 documentary about the “hunt for the Washington snipers”, shown last Thursday evening. It told a reasonably convincing factual story, and you didn’t get the feeling of axes being ground. There were some routine clichés involved, but not, you felt, because the programme makers wanted to push them, merely because those clichés seemed, to them, the things to say.
The most obvious such cliché was the claim, emitted more than once, yet undermined by a lot of the facts being presented as well as reinforced by others, that “the media” were interrupting the investigation.
From where I sat, the media pretty much were the investigation. The police, in the person of the sublimely named Chief Moose, seemed merely to be a rather helpless, hopeless clearing house for clues, and a maker of appropriate public speeches after each successive murder. “This is terrible. If you know what happened, call us.” They did nothing that a bunch of geeks in an upstairs student lodging couldn’t have done, or so it seemed.
As the blogosphere has already explained, the clinching Clue (a vehicle description and a vehicle number plate) was only released to the general public by those Media, despite the best efforts of Moose and his men to stop this Clue getting around.
Now, aside from a bit of teasing about the wretched man’s name which I’m afraid I can’t resist (a name which only a very daring novelist of the Tom Wolfe variety would have presumed to make up if telling such a story – and damn me there’s another name!), I’m not here to sneer at Chief Moose. Moose was only operating within a model of police work that has been the dominant “narrative” of how you do these things since as far back as the days of J. Edgar Hoover. Faced with a complicated and important crime, such as a string of lurid murders of non-lowlife people, you centralise information. It’s like a military operation. You no more rely on “the public” or “the media” to win your battle for you without your paternal control and guidance than you would expect a similarly anarchic arrangement to scam Nazi Germany about where the Normandy landings were going to happen (i.e. scam them into thinking it wasn’t Normandy). That kind of thing has to be a big old hundreds-of-people-at-hundreds-of-desks job.
And in the dying days of the “old” media, there is still a rationale to this. The point is, the old media are pretty much like a big old government bureaucracy, except not as sensible. In many ways the old media combine the bad features of a government bureaucracy (ignoring vital clues, obsessing about irrelevant clues, institutionalising the silly prejudices of a few powerful people) with the bad features of a mob (all following the most vigorously mobile mob-member however silly, trampling in a herd over the top of vital clues, jumping to silly conclusions).
A key moment in the Washington snipers story concerned the immediate fate of that vital Clue. Moose’s worry – and it was a perfectly genuine one – was that The Media would shove The Clue up on nationwide TV, and the Bad Guys would see The Clue before anyone else who had also seen The Clue had got around to spotting the Bad Guys in the vehicle referred to by The Clue, and the Bad Guys would dump the vehicle and carry on murdering from a different vehicle. Bye bye The Clue. Four more non-lowlife bodies. More Moose nightmares.
But now enter the blogosphere. → Continue reading: Chief Moose versus the Wolves – on not letting the Bad Guys see The Clue coming at them until it’s too late
A police officer was shot and seriously wounded after stopping a motorist in North London.
In the West Midlands, two men have been fatally shot in separate incidents.
Just what is wrong with these people? Don’t they know that guns are supposed to be banned in Britain?
The evidence is slowly mounting up and it’s pointing in one direction. The finger of suspicion is all but ready to twitch into the rigid instrument of damnable accusation. When even the most ardent and passionate supporters are starting to sniff the foul wind of failure, then you just know that the European Union is heading for the rocks.
Two articles today in the Wanker, the first by a Czech journalist Jana Ciglerova:
“We may still see the economic opportunities that we are told that Europe could bring to us. But we also now sense a fear of the unknown and even that, after barely a decade of freedom, we could be swapping one tyranny for another.”
The fruits of the lumbering Euro-cracy that has left the former Eastern Bloc countries on the periphery kicking their heels for far too long, thus giving them ample time to read through all the small print. For Brussels, the clock is ticking close to midnight now.
Also this rather more arid, technocratic item from somebody called Kirsty Hughes who is described as a writer and consultant on European Affairs’ so it is safe to assume that she knows a little of what she speaks. Evidently a passionate Europhile, even she cannot hide the cracks that are starting to appear in her head:
“The enlargement to be launched at Copenhagen is a historic achievement. But it is only the first step in meeting the European and global political challenges that the new Europe must address. If it fails, then this moment will be seen as a turning point that marked the start of the EU’s decline and not its new beginning.”
How different it all was even a year ago when everyone who was anyone was busy trumpeting the EU as the bright, shiny, exciting project for a better tomorrow with a future written in the stars and those who proffered even the mildest of criticisms were pilloried as xenophobic, reactionary losers.
Well, now the smug grins of satisfaction are on the other faces and the Wankers of the world are united in their creeping realisation that they bought a pup. It’s very nearly pitiful. Like fairy-tale children, the Europhiles are wandering in the deep, dark Graveyard of Grand Schemes, enveloped in the thick miasma of impending doom. Unable to deny its power to grip them or find a way out, they all hold hands and sully forth into the unknown, calling out plaintively for someone to come and rescue them and lead them home.
I almost feel sorry for them. Almost.
Admissions are mostly made by those who do not know their importance.
– Mr Justice Darling, Scintillae Juris, 1889
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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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