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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Dogs and their owners could become the latest target of a clampdown on moral corruption in Iran after a hardline cleric called for canines of all shapes to be arrested. Gholamreza Hassani, Friday prayer leader in the northwestern city of Urumiyeh said:
“I call on the judiciary to arrest all long-legged, medium- legged and short-legged dogs along with their long-legged owners… Otherwise I’ll do it myself.”
Commentators noted that in his latest comments, Hassani appeared to be widening the net of his anti-canine campaign since last year when he thanked police for confiscating short-legged dogs in Urumiyeh. 
The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.
– Sir Winston Churchill
The Jemaah Islamiyah organisation, which is part of the Al Qaeda network, has killed around 180 people, mostly Australian, American and British tourists in the Indonesian holiday resort of Bali. I have been to Bali myself and it is a glorious place. Although Indonesia is the worlds most populous Muslim nation, Bali has a majority Hindu population.
People are already asking what can be done about the ‘root causes’ of this horror. Well sometimes the ‘root cause’ of violence is a justified struggle against injustice. To deal with the ‘root cause’, one should therefore work to remove the injustice. But sometimes the ‘root cause’ of violence is the unjustified defence of a collective order against those who would reject it. In such cases the way to ‘mitigate’ that violence is by putting a 7.62mm hole in the head of those who would perpetrate or enable such acts.
Find the people who planned this, the people who carried it out and the people who support them. Find them and you find the only ’cause’ that matters. Rip their ‘root cause’ out by the roots and apply a blow torch. Kill them. I don’t give a damn what their grievances are. Just kill them.
The only rational response
A suicide-bomber has exploded himself in a shopping mall in Helsinki killing eight people and maiming and crippling scores of others. [I find the word ‘wounded’ to be so anodyne and unsatisfactory. It implies that the damage done can be healed by the application of some bandage and a smear of antiseptic cream. Bomb explosions leave people limbless, blind or paralysed]
It appears as if the perpetrator was a 20 year-old student but there is no indication as to his motives. Of course, given the style of attack, thoughts immediately turn to Islamic radicals but there is nothing in the reports thus far to suggest this and, in any event, why they should target the Finns is beyond me.
More likely this young man’s head was buzzing with some other kind of savage insanity but the method he has used to vent it does have some significance nonethless. We have never been short of psychotics or dangerous malcontents in our midst but when they do finally unhinge they typically do so by taking pot-shots at their employers or attacking their landladies with a kitchen knife.
Is this changing up a gear? Could it be that the suicide-bombing is becoming the preferable modus operandi for the deranged and the grudge-ridden? It is certainly a far more dramatic way of leaving your forget-me-not impression on a world that you loathe and that you believe loathes you.
Maybe I am extrapolating too far here. It is, for sure, too early for anything like a cogent analysis. But, if it turns out that I am on the right track, then we all better start watching out for that twitchy guy on the bus; that thing on his shoulder could be a lot more than just a chip.
I think one of the biggest mistakes made by Classical Liberals in Britain was to allow (and, indeed, encourage) the government to start funding education in the 19th Century. He who pays the piper calls the tune and it was only a matter of time before the government took over education and began to run it as the state monopoly we are still lumbered with today.
As with all these monolithic government services they are indifferent to the needs of their customers, exisitng primarily as fiefdoms of a professional education establishment. Well-to-do families can afford to escape the system but not so modest income and poor families whose children are left victimised by the shambolic sausage factories through which they are processed.
To date, there has been insufficient challenge to this state monopoly but that could all be about to change. Last night I had the pleasure of meeting James Stansfield at the October ‘Putney Debate’ hosted by Tim Evans. James works with the famous James Tooley, a former socialist who has seen the light and now campaigns for a free market in education. Together they have established the EG West Centre at the University of Newcastle; an academic research body dedicated to spreading radical ideas about the provision of education by means other than the state.
The man after whom the project is named, EG West, was a British-born academic who did most of his work in Canada in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Swimming completely against the tide of the received wisdom of that era, this man who concluded, from his meticulously documented research, that state education was a disaster. Unsurprisingly, he was pilloried by the rest of academia and the education establishment as some kind of dangerous madman before being proved absolutely correct.
→ Continue reading: A single candle is lit
No man’s life, liberty or property are safe while the legislature is in session.
– Judge Gideon J. Tucker
After periodic, and if the truth be known, inevitable paedophile scandals in Britain of the sort that occurs in every school system in the world, checks on the backgrounds of teachers have been stepped up and made more rigorous. No problem there as if someone has a history of paedophile activities, it is entirely reasonable that a potential educational employer should want to discover that.
But then why does the state insist that as part of this information gathering process, that the prospective teacher reveals their banking details and how to access their secure password to get at their financial details?
It is because the Panopticon state regards privacy as in and of itself a cause for suspicion.
Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are a good person is a little like expecting the bull not to attack you because you are a vegetarian.
– Dennis Wholey
In what can only be the yet another indication the the EU intends to ignore even the semblance of democratic norms when it does not suit them, whilst at the same time wrapping themselves in the cloak of legitimacy that the European ‘Parliament’ allegedly brings:
Günter Verheugen, enlargement Commissioner, said on Wednesday, that it would be difficult to interpret a second No by the Irish: “If a treaty is rejected twice in a country and that country knows exactly that this treaty is a precondition for the conclusions of enlargement negotiations, the outside world cannot make the judge whether the rejections means enlargement or something else.”
So if Ireland votes NO to EU enlargement, Günter Verheugen feels it might in fact mean something other than NO to enlargement. I suspect I understand the source of the misunderstanding: When translated by official EU translators from Irish accented English, into Greek and then into Danish and then back into English, the result was:
A pint of Guinness please
However when translated by official EU translators from Irish accented English, into German and then into Swedish and then back into English, the result was:
Top of the morning to you, Mrs. Murphy
Yet when translated by official EU translators from Irish accented English, into Portuguese and then into Italian and then back into English, the result was:
We are just a bunch of Paddy jokers, pay no attention to us
No wonder poor Günter Verheugen is confused as to the meaning of the word NO.
Thanks to Instapundit, I have just come across this gem of a blog. It seems to consist of three guys writing a fairly lengthy and very well thought out articles about French anti-Americanism, Rousseauian Conservatives, New Jersey, UN and global warming, American politics, EU, you name it. Last Tuesday they even discovered John Fonte and his Tranzi article. Welcome to the fold!
Go and see for yourself, they are definitely worth the read!
I suppose it is only to be expected that Iain Duncan Smith would round off the Conservative Conference in Bournemouth with a triumphal assertion that the ‘the Tories are back’. The poor man could hardly do otherwise having presided over a week of fractious in-fighting, broody soul-searching and insurrectionary plots to topple him as leader. He just had to try to end things on an upbeat note and stamp his authority.
But is he right? Like Perry, I think that the answer is ‘no’ and, furthermore, I feel that the situation is unlikely to be improved by any well-spun policy initiatives. The problem for the Conservatives was, in fact, highlighted this last week by their Chairman, Theresa May when she exhorted the assembled party faithful to work to shed their ‘nasty image’. Therein lies the crux of the problem: nobody likes the Conservative because they are popularly seen as being ‘nasty’ and ‘uncaring’, i.e. it is believed that, once in power, they will cut taxes, curtail generous welfare handouts, privatise healthcare and education and stop creating sinecure jobs in the public sector for the competence-challenged.
Now there’s a sublime irony here because, in the event that the Tories ever did ascend the throne again, they are highly unlikely to do any of those things. For sure, about half of the party consists of people who would very much like to do those things but the other half consists of people who would rather stick their genitals in a food blender and press the ‘On’ button before they rocked any boats whatosever, and it’s the latter half that usually wins (as well as being the half that toppled Mrs.T). → Continue reading: Conservatives up the creek
The Space Elevator concept is one I’ve always found to be of interest, but which I personally placed at least a century or more in the future. I remember many fun discussions in the early days of the sci.space netnews group; in which calculations of exponential tapers, masses and tensile strength tables were batted about gleefully. Carbon nanotubes were still in the future back then; and even in later discussions we all considered mass production of real fibres to be very far off.
Well, sometimes even those of us who have one foot in the next decade are too pessimistic. A company, High Lift Systems, has been formed to work on a near term design. Advances in production of carbon nanotubes have (mostly) solved the last basic problem. We will soon be able to build sufficient quantities of sufficiently strong material to actually build one.
Of course there is that one little detail of raising $10 billion dollars in the capital markets…
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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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