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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Kevin Connors thinks the Democratic Party is in even worse shape than many think
In his National Post article, Matt Welch has the audacity to assert that California Governor Gray Davis, perhaps the most loathsome major office holder in America today, is a front-runner for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 2004. He has a snowball’s chance in hell, but the fact that an idea so preposterous would even have currency is telling of the sorry shape of the party.
At least a plurality of pundits agree that the nomination is Al Gore’s for the taking, if he wants it. because “that’s the way things are done.” But he’d have to totally reinvent himself to be more than a joke in the general election. The same can be said of Tom Daschle, Joe Biden and Dick Gephardt; they represent a Democratic party that the electorate has roundly rejected in this year’s election.
Of those currently in the spotlight, only John Kerry would seem to have the least chance in November of 2004. But, I believe, he still falls far short of the mark. Joe Leiberman, while he has looked good vis-a-vis the War on Terror, is still quite tainted from selling out his moderate principles to share the ticket with Gore in 2000. And, sadly, there’s always his religion to consider.
What the Democrats need at this point is a knight in shining armour. An otherwise unconsidered figure to come riding in out of the shadows and save the day. I assert that The man to fill the bill here is Sam Nunn. At 64 and retired from the Senate since 1996, the Georgia professor and attorney is still quite active in politics and business. His moderate credentials are solid, he is highly respected on matters of education, defense, and foreign relations and is very well liked both in and out of Washington (but apparently not North Korea). Sam Nunn is the last best hope for the Jackass Party.
Kevin Connors
Indeed, the safest road to Hell is the gradual one – the gentle one, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.
– C.S. Lewis, in The Screwtape Letters
Brian Micklethwait once engaged me with an interesting, pet theory of his. It goes something like this: you can always tell when an organisation or institution is about to die because, just before they expire, they spend gargantuan sums of money on a big, swanky, impressive, dedicated headquarters.
Brian has a bagful of interesting theories which may or may not hold water but it is the one above which flagged up for me when I read this:
“On September 30, the U.N. unveiled plans for a billion-dollar, top-to-bottom renovation of its New York headquarters. The plan also includes the construction of a new 30-story office tower, which will displace a public playground next door.
Brian, you’d better be right.
I have been decrying the rapid emergence of a British panoptic total surveillance state but do not think this is a purely British problem. A NYTimes article reports Pentagon plans a computer system that would peek at personal data of Americans
(Free registration required to link). Peek is of course a euphemism for ‘spy on’.
Historically, military and intelligence agencies have not been permitted to spy on Americans without extraordinary legal authorization. But Admiral Poindexter, the former national security adviser in the Reagan administration, has argued that the government needs broad new powers to process, store and mine billions of minute details of electronic life in the United States.
Admiral Poindexter, who has described the plan in public documents and speeches but declined to be interviewed, has said that the government needs to “break down the stovepipes” that separate commercial and government databases, allowing teams of intelligence agency analysts to hunt for hidden patterns of activity with powerful computers.
“We must become much more efficient and more clever in the ways we find new sources of data, mine information from the new and old, generate information, make it available for analysis, convert it to knowledge, and create actionable options,” he said in a speech in California earlier this year.
Naturally anyone who values civil liberties and is not blindly trusting of the state is far from enthusiastic about this.
“A lot of my colleagues are uncomfortable about this and worry about the potential uses that this technology might be put, if not by this administration then by a future one,” said Barbara Simon, a computer scientist who is past president of the Association of Computing Machinery. “Once you’ve got it in place you can’t control it.”
[…]
If deployed, civil libertarians argue, the computer system would rapidly bring a surveillance state. They assert that potential terrorists would soon learn how to avoid detection in any case.
Yet of course that is not what the official line. Predictably…
“What we are doing is developing technologies and a prototype system to revolutionize the ability of the United States to detect, classify and identify foreign terrorists, and decipher their plans, and thereby enable the U.S. to take timely action to successfully pre-empt and defeat terrorist acts,” said Jan Walker, the spokeswoman for the defense research agency.
And how will they “detect, classify and identify foreign terrorists”? By spying on the communications of tens of millions of Americans daily without so much as a search warrent of course. This is far from just a British problem.
I am never in favour of war… but the fact is we are now in a war, so the question is, do we win it?
– David Carr
As the Council of Europe grows more confident, the authoritarian future planned for all who live under the blue & gold stary crown of thorns is rapidly becoming an authoritarian present.
The venerable Eurocrats have decreed that, “‘racist and xenophobic material’ means any written material, any image or any other representation of ideas or theories, which advocates, promotes or incites hatred, discrimination or violence, against any individual or group of individuals, based on race, colour, descent or national or ethnic origin, as well as religion if used as pretext for any of these factors.”
[…]
The actual criminal act is “making publicly available, through a computer system” any of the [Council of Europe]’s forbidden thoughts. And be warned; there’s a nice weasel clause for carriers — the CoE castrators are very smart. They know that if they held carriers liable the carriers would lobby this piece of bureaucratic abuse into the dust bin. You are on your own here, and by clever design. You will either take to the streets en masse and sternly warn your government that you will not be told what you can and cannot say, or you will be told what you can and cannot say.
We should like to think that this madness won’t stand long; but as Chesterton noted, it’s the business of Liberals to make imbecilic mistakes like these, and the business of Conservatives to ensure that they never get fixed.
Soon the fact that I regard the EU as a cabal of Transnational Socialist who will turn all Europe into a panoptic nightmare may well be considered ‘xenophobic material’ and thus could get me locked up if I wrote that on Samizdata.net from within the EU. Of course the more likely that looks like becoming a realty, the more you will see pseudonymous postings on Samizdata.net and possibly a change of hosting locale. The state is not your friend… and super-states even less so.
The time is coming for things to start getting nasty. Now that habeas corpus has been made meaningless in Britain, if one of Samizdata.net’s British contributors writing from London upsets a Greek politician by writing something like, say…
All PASOK politicians are a bunch of corrupt socialist bastards who allowed the ’17 November’ terrorist organisation to operate in Greece with impunity for decades because it is actually controlled by elements within PASOK. Recent ‘successes’ against N17 will of course uncover exactly nothing.
Well, merely expressing that view can result in a knock on a door in London by British police with a Greek arrest warrant that cites EU law, and next stop for the person who dared to express a dissenting view is some hell hole jail in the armpit of Europe that was once the cradle of Western civilisation.
This is not something that is the fevered products of wacko anti-EU conspiracy theorists, it is reality and it is well any truly upon Europeans and Britons alike. Transnational fascism of coming, in the guise of anti-fascism, and it is coming right now.
The British newspapers are agog at rape allegations inside the Royal Household.
Yawn.
The British state daily rapes million of people of billions of pounds to pay for ‘services’ that fail to deliver whilst blighting the economy and distorting civil society… yet the idiot media concentrates of the trivial antics of House of Windsor, who are little more than a bunch of national tourist attractions who at least generate more money than they cost the hapless taxpayer. Now that is the true scandal, not who might or might not have buggered whom in some drafty palace.
A leading Tory moderniser warned that the party had to be completely transformed and must be ready to give up “some of the things we hold dear” if it was ever to win power again.
Could he possibly mean giving up its statist attitude and blinkered view of reality? Has the Tory Party seen light at the end of the tunnel? No, Archie Norman, a close ally of Michael Portillo once seen as a Thatcherite Tory leader hopeful, called for tax rises to pay for improved public services.
Not only are the views of Mr Norman, a direct challenge to Ian Duncan Smith’s policy (shock! horror!) but tax rises?! To fund public services?! There is light at the end of the tunnel but, alas, it is an on-coming train…
It is morbid fun watching the Conservative party stumble into oblivion. Meanwhile, Labour, given its own problems, must regard it as a blessing rather than political opposition.
I found while driving in Wyoming that wearing a stetson and driving a beat-up pickup meant you could go as fast as you like, while the police picked up Californian winnebagos that went one mph over 55. After all, they wanted to bring money into the state, not merely circulate it.
-Terry Pratchett
…you fat (alliterative expletive deleted)?
No, not you, dear reader. I refer only to a few words quoted in Jim Bennett’s latest column. The opening sentences might be of particular interest to Samizdata readers. If the line quoted sounds slightly different from the way you remember it, bear in mind that they are a pure-minded lot at UPI. Not like us lot who will print anything.
Oh, and just as an aside, Jim Bennett touches on two subjects that I’d like him to explore further: tort law reform and Ireland.
At least that’s what Law.com says.
We always knew Glenn was destined fer a better title than Perfesser…
The Massachusetts people put in an enormous amount of work these last two years. They put their entire personal lives on hold to fight for Liberty. They came within a statistical whisker of forcing the biggest tax abolition in US history that we are aware of. They fought for our Party.
After the dust and confetti settle and the balloons are all popped… there are the bills. Lots of them. It’s not glamorous or exciting. But they must be paid before moving on.
Please consider helping them close out the old so they can move on to the new.
You can visit their tip jar or you can go to one of their web sites and read about it first.
Carla Howell
Michael Cloud
Small Government Initiative
Our teams fight with perhaps a hundredth of the resources of the Left and Right. Do your part to change the equation.
If we have to buy our Liberty back, then so be it.
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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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