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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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 Bucharest, Romania, August 2010
A simply astonishing story from Alex Deane of Big Brother Watch: Smokers harrassed – with the encouragement of a school, and the co-operation of the police
On one perfectly reasonable reading of this story, “harrassed” is too mild a term. The correct word is “assaulted”. I am no lawyer, but this looks to me as though it could involve multiple crimes – not just assault but also theft, and encouraging minors to commit assault and theft, if those are separate charges.
Outrageously the fagins here are not underworld characters but the Hundred of Hoo Comprehensive School in Medway (cute name, shame about the Special Measures), Kent Police, and something called “A Better Medway”, described as “a joint initiative between the council and NHS Medway that encourages healthy living”. “A Better Medway” part-funded the project, paying for filming equipment.
According to This is Kent, quoted by Alex Deane, the first few filmed attacks featured stooges and then they went on to “other people”. I can’t quite figure out whether or not the”other people” were members of the public who participated voluntarily as “extras” in an admitted fiction or whether they were real victims. My spidey-senses are a-tingle with the suspicion of some hasty re-writing of history after hostile attention; the comments to the sycophantic This is Kent piece are gratifyingly hostile. Also, the video admiringly profiled in Kent Online has now been removed by the user.
Irrespective of whether the videos are real or fake, videos that show apparent assaults in an approving manner incite others to commit similar assaults on smokers for real.
Indeed, they incite others to commit any other type of assault that the attackers may deem is good for the victims. The law, of course, forbids people to rip the veils off Muslim women who go about swathed – though at least as many people the veils offensive as find cigarettes offensive, and there is a reasonable case to be made – as reasonable as the case for doing good by force being made by the Ciggy Busters – that having their veils ripped off might do them good in the end and help them kick the masking habit. The law also forbids incitement to such assaults. If I were to make a “burqa busters” video the police would be round in an instant, and the defence that everyone involved was only acting would cut no ice with the Crown Prosecution Service.
Why should not that law also apply in this case?
Head Start, which provides preschool programs to poor families, is a prime example of the Senate committee’s true attitude toward evidence-based decision-making. In January, the Health and Human Services Department released a study of Head Start’s overall impact. The conclusions were disturbing. By the end of first grade, the study found, Head Start graduates were doing no better than students who didn’t attend Head Start. “No significant impacts were found for math skills, pre-writing, children’s promotion, or teacher report of children’s school accomplishments or abilities in any year,” the report concluded.
And how did the Senate panel react to this dismal evidence? They set aside $8.2 billion for Head Start in 2011, almost a billion dollars more than in 2010. Of course, the fact that Congress spends billions of dollars each year on unproven programs does not itself argue that the government should start spending hundreds of millions of new dollars on new unproven programs. But it does undercut the argument that federal education dollars should be reserved only for conclusively proven initiatives.
– Paul Tough in an op-ed in the New York Times.
…via Steve Sailer, who comments:
That’s pretty funny when you stop and think about it.
In the intifada that began in 2000, Palestinian terrorism killed more than 1,000 Israelis. As a portion of U.S. population, that would be 42,000, approaching the toll of America’s eight years in Vietnam. During the onslaught, which began 10 Septembers ago, Israeli parents sending two children to a school would put them on separate buses to decrease the chance that neither would return for dinner. Surely most Americans can imagine, even if their tone-deaf leaders cannot, how grating it is when those leaders lecture Israel on the need to take “risks for peace.”
– George Will.
The A-Level pass rate has risen for the 28th successive year.
Debasing the coinage. It’s what governments do.
Business partner Rand Simberg has this to say about the attempts of Congress to design pork propelled rockets. The only practical idea in the lot is the BFR from SpaceX, and that (in my opinion) only if a market of 500 Metric Tons or so a year materializes.
As someone who has consistently been in favor of in-your-face attempts to offend Muslims (e.g., “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day”), I can’t very well advocate any governmental effort (or any violent effort by other parties) to prevent the building of this in-your-face attempt to offend non-Muslim Americans. But to suggest that this center is not provocative, and that Americans should not see it as such, insults my intelligence. There is no right to NOT be offended, but we have every right to be offended, and to protest loudly to that effect.
– Commenter Gene
This comment by Tim Sandefur pretty much captures my own view on the row over the “Mosque” at Ground Zero (or whatever this building is meant to be called).
In a separate forum, I got into quite a heated debate with folks over the fact that I said that while I defend the rights of owners of property to do what they want with said property, that does not mean I cannot be angry at the gesture of say, building a Islamic centre right next to the scene of an act of mass-murder by Islamic fanatics. My anger, apparently, has led to a few folk calling me out as a sort of bigot. Not so: I can see both sides of the argument here: the families of 9/11 victims feel, with cause, that the location of this building is a fairly crass and provocative gesture and are concerned at the possible choice of name – the Cordoba Center, and about the possible sources of funding for it.
On the other, let’s not forget – and this is a point that needs to be made regularly – that Muslims going about their lawful business were murdered on that terrible day, and their families might want to have that fact acknowledged in some sort of way by having a place to worship in a place that gives meaning to their grief.
But it would help things if those who are concerned about the motives of this centre would not automatically be dubbed as stooges of Sarah Palin or some sort of great right wing conspiracy. Part of the annoyance that folk feel about this is that there is a sense of injustice that while Islam benefits in the West from the broad protections of freedom of expression, that that tolerance is not reciprocated in the countries where this religion holds sway. Try building a Catholic church in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia, after all, is a country that has funded dozens of mosques and other places, including those encouraging some of the most extreme forms of Islam. Saudi funding is akin to a government grant rather than a donation from a private individual.
Most revolutions throughout history have been conducted by a small but determined group, maybe as much as 20% of the population (and probably less). The majority of the people are basically indifferent, just keeping their heads down until the shooting stops so they can go back to their lives under the rule of whoever prevailed. 20% could be more than enough for a successful revolution, but it’s not enough to win an election.
– Commenter ‘Laird’
I like this article about the 30th President of the United States, Calvin Coolidge. It is a reminder that at one time, the holder of that office did not regard himself as a rockstar. Maybe he was lucky in being born before the age of TV. If he had been around in more recent times, maybe our views would be different. I bet Churchill would have been massacred on TV.
My favourite story about Silent Cal, as he was known (not a man of long windy speeches), was when he was once coming out of a church, and was approached by the usual journalist types asking him about what the preacher said in his sermon. “Sin”, replied the POTUS. “Er, what did the preacher say about it?”, asked the hacks.
“He’s against it,” replied Mr Coolidge. (Try and top that, PJ O’Rourke).
Paul Johnson’s Modern Times, about which I wrote the other day, taught me a good appreciation of Coolidge. There is also a nice collection of some of his comments here.
Tim Worstall has a good headscratcher of an article about an aspect of the recent financial crisis: what is called securitisation. To those not familiar with this term, it is the process by which banks and other financial institutions that lend money out – such as mortgages – use the repayments as collateral to take out loans of their own, at a (hopefully) lower rate of interest, and thereby make a profit on the difference between the two. The idea is that by packaging loans and other IOUs into big parcels, and then selling these packages to end-investors such as pension funds or life firms, that the risks inherent in the individual mortgages and loans are spread out among a wide circle of investors.
On the face of it, that sounds smart: spreading risk is, after all, the basis of insurance. However, unlike say, fire insurance, defaults on bonds tend to rise and fall in line with the economic cycle: you do not usually get a massive uptick in fires every three or four years, for example, although in bad periods a combination of natural disasters can hammer insurers.
A lot of this financial engineering, and the associated alphabet soup of acronym terms for the various products involved, has come under fire from all those books that got published in the aftermath of the crisis. A typical example is Gillan Tett’s effort, Fool’s Gold, which tends to play to the “evil bankers” schtick that has become so familiar. I prefer this and this.
As Tim says, the problem, however, is that banks did not – contrary to the conventional wisdom that has condemned securitisation – done nearly enough of this sort of thing. In fact, when the shit hit the fan in 2007/08, many banks and other lenders had not managed to securitise their loans and had to make massive writedowns as defaults mounted. Case in point: HBOS and Royal Bank of Scotland in the UK.
The trouble, though, is that beating up on banks for not doing enough to remove credit risk from their balance sheet ignores, I think, the underlying problem that has been mentioned before here, which is that in a world where central banks set interest rates and cut them at any sign of economic trouble, banks will be under enormous commercial pressure to chase yield where they can, by lending money to high-risk ventures. Until and only when borrowing is financed from real savings rather than central bank Monopoly money, the underlying causes of such recent messes will not go away.
Even so, Tim has raised a smart point that kicks against the usual clichés, which is one reason why his blog is one of my daily reads.
“Traditionally, a bank is a means by which old people with capital lend to young people with ideas. But the advanced democracies with their mountains of sovereign debt are in effect old people who’ve blown through their capital and are all out of ideas looking for young people flush enough to bail them out. And the idea that it might be time for the spendthrift geezers to change their ways butts up against their indestructible moral vanity. Last year, President Sarkozy said that the G20 summit provided “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to give capitalism a conscience.” European capitalism may have a conscience. It’s not clear it has a pulse. And, actually, when you’re burning Greek bank clerks to death in defence of your benefits, your “conscience” isn’t much in evidence, either.”
– Mark Steyn, writing about Greece and the ongoing train-crash of the European welfare state model.
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