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Fellow imperialist Norman aggressor Harry de Quetteville does an exquisite take down of Oliver Stone in the Telegraph. It is so delicious that extracting a passage just does not do it justice.
…Oh I just cannot resist…
I pushed a woman under a bus this morning. Nice looking old girl she was, looked like she’d just had her hair done. Maybe she was off somewhere special, but we won’t know now will we, not since I pushed her under the bus.
She hadn’t done anything wrong, apart from being old. But you wouldn’t believe the hoo-ha the whole scene created. Some people next to me looked positively aghast as those big double-decker wheels rolled over her. Then some others jumped on me and held me down until the police arrived.
Read the whole thing. Simply splendid.
Free association is one of the bedrocks of civil society, so when ‘faith based’ schools start complaining about the secular state interfering with who they can and cannot admit, my first response is to urge these folks to inform the state that it is none of their god-damn business.
It is surely a matter for religious group themselves to define their own congregation. In short, if they actually have any deeply held principles, and if they do not, why call themselves ‘faith based’ at all, they should simply refuse to comply with the state’s demands. Just point blank refuse.
To their credit some Catholic adoption agencies shut down last year due to the state demanding they operate in contravention of Catholic principles (by placing children with homosexual couples), but it remains to be seen if any schools will do likewise and shut down rather than comply, or better yet, simply ignore the regulations on who they admit.
But that said, at the same time that these schools should refuse to obey secular direction of their religious based institutions, they must also refuse to take a single penny of state money. Why? Because if they take the taxpayer’s coin… coin which has been extracted from believers and non-believers via the political system… they cannot then complain if that money comes with politically imposed conditions.
We don’t have to show the slightest respect for other people’s views – just for their right to hold them. Respect, after all, must be earned. It’s only freedom of speech that’s a right. When someone says something which you find stupid or offensive, you can say something back. You can tell them to fuck off. They don’t have to, but they’ve still been told.
– David Mitchell, writing about the self-publicising Islam4UK. As Mr Mitchell says, we should have the right to be offensive, and we should have to put up with being offended sometimes. A pity that we don’t.
Freedom of speech has ceased to be a right in Britain. In practice you are no longer permitted to be offensive, if you are within the grasp of the authorities. You may be threatened or arrested, have property seized, or forced to defend a criminal trial. Sell or wear a mildly rude T-shirt, and you may find public order legislation stretched to make an example of you. Write down “inappropriate” fantasies in a blog, or a poem, and prepare to defend a serious criminal charge. Quarrel with someone, a planning department, say, and if they can even suggest you hinted at forbidden speech, they can use the police to intimidate you.
In Britain, a woman alone in her own home cannot even brandish a knife to defend herself, let alone actually use one.
The youths approached the kitchen window, before attempting to break into her garden shed, prompting Miss Klass to wave a kitchen knife to scare them away. Miss Klass, 31, who was alone in her house in Potters Bar, Herts, with her two-year-old daughter, Ava, called the police. When they arrived at her house they informed her that she should not have used a knife to scare off the youths because carrying an “offensive weapon” – even in her own home – was illegal.
The lesson here is simple: never call the police. Never. Ever. They would have arrived too late to protect her had it turned violent and in any case Myleene Klass, who acted commendably by making it clear to intruders that she would defend herself and her child, was the only person who actually faced the possibility of arrest when the police did arrive.
If you have to defend yourself, do not call the cops afterwards and if possible leave the scene as soon as you can, no matter how clear it is that you are the aggrieved party. And if worst comes to worse and you get into a violent confrontation in your own home with an intruder, try to make sure your story is the only one the cops will hear (under no circumstances try to detain the scrot for the coppers to collect).
And if the cops do show up, just remember that your statement is not about speaking truth from a position of innocence, it is about not giving the state any pretext to arrest you. Stay nothing about what happened until your lawyer arrives.
Just remember that arresting you for daring to defend yourself is easier than looking for some criminal who attacked you because the police know where you live and getting any arrest shows up as a positive result in their statistics. Ideally just defend yourself and do not call them at all afterwards.
Myleene, you had the right instincts and you have my respect… your only mistake, and it is a big one, is to assume the cops in the UK are on your side and a young mum home alone with her child was legally entitled to defend herself. They ain’t and you are not. You have the moral right to do whatever it takes to defend yourself from intruders, but the police have no interest in such niceties.
The state is not your friend.
The weather is cold and snowy in Britain just now – even, now, in central London – but people like Richard North are actually quite enjoying this:
It is global warming here again, and it is getting serious. It is not so much the depth, as the repeated falls. Each layer compacts and freezes which, with fresh global warming on top becomes lethally slippery.
Time was, what with the AGW crowd pretty much completely controlling the agenda, when this kind of elegant mockery would be dismissed as the ignorance of the uninitiated. But the fact is that the present wintry weather is extremely significant in this debate. True, the weather today is not the climate for the next century, but sooner or later weather does turn into climate, and the weather has, from the AGW point of view, been misbehaving for a decade. Their precious Hockey Stick said that the temperature of the globe would disappear off the top right hand corner of the page, right about now. Well it hasn’t, has it?
As John Redwood recently asked Ed Miliband in the House of Commons, concerning the present very cold weather:
… which of the climate models had predicted this?
None, it quickly became clear from Mr Miliband’s faltering reply, that Mr Miliband has been paying any attention to (although other sorts of models have predicted cold winters rather successfully).
But this is not just about looking out of the window and seeing if global warming is to be observed or not (as Richard North well understands). The other point here is the authority of the people upon whom people like Ed Miliband have been relying. Not only have none of Miliband’s “experts” (sneer quotes entirely deliberate) been able to predict the recent succession of colder winters; it goes way beyond that. The point is: these experts assured the world, or allowed their more ignorant followers to assure the world, that these cold winters would not happen, and despite all their protestations now about how weather is not climate, well, shouldn’t they have born this in mind when saying, only a few short years ago, and repeating ever since, that winter snow in places like Britain would be a thing of the past? Should they not have been more careful about seizing upon any bursts of warm weather, any bursts of weather of any kind, come to that, as evidence of the truth of global warming? Had they truly understood the point that they have been reduced to making now, they would have been a lot more modest in their recent, and in Britain economically disastrous, medium range predictions. See also, John Redwood’s follow up posting. Redwood is now talking more sense about the world’s climate than the British Met Office. → Continue reading: Cold wars
On the front cover of the current edition of the Economist people are given a “Bubble Warning“. If one reads the article to which the front cover refers, one is informed that the massive monetary expansion (i.e. creating money from nothing) and fiscal deficits of various governments, but particularly the United States and the United Kingdom, have artificially maintained false values in assets – in everything from shares to housing and commercial property. A vast bubble economy – an unsustainable mess that these governments have no real plan to deal with.
I admit that I read Economist articles (when I read them at all) through a deep red haze of rage – but I think I would have spotted the words “we are very sorry we gave governments such bad advice all through the current crises” and I do not remember them being there. For, of course, it was the Economist itself (along with the rest of the establishment) that pushed the policies of bailout (TARP and so on) and “stimulus” that have meant that markets have not cleared, mal-investments have not really been liquidated and the bubble economy now stares us in the face.
The economic crises of 2008 was caused by the general increase in the money supply pushed (each time they “saved the world” i.e. prevented a clear out of mal-investments, year after year) by Central Banks – particularly (but certainly not exclusively) by Alan Greenspan of the Federal Reserve. The role of the Fed in general is explained in Thomas Woods’ work “Meltdown”, and the political reasons why the increase in the money supply flowed especially into the housing market are explained in Thomas Sowell’s work “Housing: Boom and Bust”.
In 2008 is was no longer possible to avoid a terrible economic slump. That chance was lost when Greenspan (and his fellow government Central Bankers) had “saved the world” by avoiding (by increasing the money supply) the painful but needed clearing of the market and liquidation of mal-investments – which they did again and again over the years, with each time they did leaving the bubble economy worse than it was before – putting off the problem (and making it worse) not solving it. → Continue reading: The hypocrisy of the ‘Bubble Warning’ in the Economist magazine
This is not a joke.
Well, it is a joke. However, the Home Office does not seem to realise this.
Reading the comments at The Register is always good value in times like this, too.
Somebody please tell me that this is really a withering piece of satire dreamed up by Guy Herbert. Please.
Elvis would have been 75 today. I remember the day he died, and he was a megastar way before I was a twinkle in my mother’s eye. But I watched a couple of TV shows last night about him, featuring some of his performances, and even with the grainy old TV, some of that amazing charisma comes across.
Helen Evans, who runs Nurses for Reform, a campaigning organisation dedicated to free-market options for healthcare in the UK, got to meet Conservative Party leader David Cameron a couple of weeks ago. The Daily Mirror [here, here and here] and the Daily Telegraph found out about the meeting and offered their own take on it.
Broadly, I agree that the proposals are in the right direction, although I have concerns about some of the tactics suggested and their formulation, which I deal with later. The bit that was not previously familiar to me was the idea that a barrier to entry should be at least lowered, by amending local planning rules to make it easier to open a new healthcare facility. I’m told the Conservative Party already favours this for schools, so the extension to clinics should not be difficult.
Having read the briefing document presented to the Leader of the Opposition, I disagree with one element of the strategy being proposed, specifically this passage: “the [National Health Service] NHS should be renamed the National Health SYSTEM and that under its auspices patients should benefit from a universal right to independent hospital care and treatment.”
A “universal right” is something that a government could be justified in declaring war to defend, like “freedom from slavery” or freedom from the use of confessions extracted under torture in criminal trials. It could certainly be a pretext for new taxes, a new bureaucracy, more regulations, and the restriction of other “non-universal” rights. Sadly, this call for declaring that privately-provided healthcare is a right could become the very instrument for imposing regulations (such as US Medicare-style price controls, or French-style government control on where doctors can practise [link in French]) that violate patient and physician freedom. To give a specific example: could a private clinic be fined for not providing 24-hour accident and emergency access? I would expect a government agency to do just that. Meanwhile, of course, government facilities which operate “in the public interest” would be excused.
A second concern comes in a later paragraph: “health censorship must be outlawed and patients must be empowered with greater access to information.” Outlawed? Must be empowered? By what agency, regulation, funded by what taxes or levies, with what powers of inspection and control?
These may seem like quibbles, but the law of intended consequences suggests that the wording of reforms can be as important as their spirit. Consider the US Constitution’s First Amendment:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Does it say that Congress cannot give money to the Food and Drug Administration to hunt down anyone making claims about the alleged benefits to cancer patients of drinking grapefruit juice? No it does not. It means it, I think, but can I prove it to the US Supreme Court? Probably not.
It might be more boring to do, but the best way to remove censorship would be to revoke the clauses of those laws and regulations that allow it. As for “empowerment,” if this comes from the government it will mean a Department of Truth in Advertising demand for a quarterly report from all private providers as to how they inform the public, with fines for not reaching a wide enough audience.
On the positive side, Nurses for Reform finds that the ownership by a government department of most of the UK’s hospitals is a potential conflict of interest. There is the temptation to hide problems, to restrict information about alternative (often newer) treatments, the cozy relationship between the government employees in the NHS and those of the Department of Health who are supposed to watch them.
Dr Evans is therefore absolutely right to suggest the immediate transfer of ownership of NHS hospitals out of “public ownership,” and she is also correct that the “Secretary of State for Health must no longer have any say over when or where hospitals are built, opened or closed.”
On the issue of advertising, or freedom to communicate with the public in general, the major benefit would be that people could get an idea of which were the better brands (either cheapest, or best quality, or best balance between the two). If we think of how Aldi and Lidl can co-exist with ASDA, Tesco, Sainsbury, Waitrose and independent grocers, we can see how variety of branding can lead to beneficial competition: new treatments, more options and probably less queues.
Personally, I see no point whatsoever in delaying the reform of NHS funding: it merely prolongs unnecessary suffering and provides more opportunities for opponents of change to mobilise, like Gorbachev’s “perestroika” versus the liquidation of the soviet system. Having little expectation of any progress under a new Conservative Party government this coming year, it would be a pleasant surprise if Dr Evans’ proposals came to fruition. But at least no one can now claim that the case was not made.
[UPDATE: corrected link for Daily Telegraph article]
I will be in Dubai on January 16 and again on February 7-9, Singapore January 17-18 and again on January 29-31, the Gold Coast and Brisbane from January 19 to 28 (except January 25-26, when I will be in Sydney), Hanoi from January 31 to February 4 and Melaka from February 5-6. If anyone feels like buying me a drink in any of those locations, please let me know and I will see what I can do.
People (like Anatole Kaletsky) who have the view that large quantities of government debt somehow don’t matter and are are not potentially damaging would do well to listen to this talk given by Professor Kevin Dowd, that I was fortunate enough to attend at the Libertarian International conference in Paris last September.
An audio only version is here.
The whole talk is good, but the first half (mainly about sound ways of recapitalising banks) is drier than the second. The really good stuff gets going at about the 20 minute mark.
Update: For the first few minutes of this lecture, it seems that Professor Dowd is giving the same talk he gave at the Chris Tame lecture earlier in the year. However, this is not the case. He gets through that in the first half of the talk. It is in the second half of this that he really says exactly what he thinks, and it is refreshing to hear someone just come out and say these things. If you heard the earlier lecture, it is still worth listening to at least the second half of this one.
Talking of conviction parties, as I was the other day, how about this shamelessly populist rant, from the leader of the LPUK. Its basic message is very simple:
Join us.
Alas, whenever I hear that phrase I tend to be reminded of a big ugly guy in a hat, beckoning, with a machine gun, to Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon to come over and become bit part players (i.e. corpses) in a gangland massacre that the two soon-to-be cross-dressers have just made the mistake of witnessing. Luckily, the machine gun guys get distracted by the arrival of some cops, or Some Like It Hot would not have been much of a movie.
Mr Devil’s Kitchen didn’t mean it that way. I wish him and his party the best of luck. They will need it. Times have changed since I wrote this, and as I said in my posting yesterday the internet has changed the rules for small political parties hugely. I now think that however difficult and dangerous a British Libertarian political party may prove to be, it simply has to happen. Certainly lots of others think it has to, to the point of joining it in quite promising numbers, and who am I to try to stop them? But many of the warnings in that Libertarian Alliance piece from over a decade ago do still apply.
I wonder how many candidates the LPUK will manage to field in the next general election? The willingness to be (electorally speaking) massacred is unfortunately a job requirement, but as I said in my earlier bit about UKIP, the silly parties might actually soon start doing a bit better, what with the big three parties being so widely despised, and now that the silly parties no longer depend on mainstream media coverage to be noticed at all.
I consider it interesting that UKIP and LPUK have both recently followed the Conservatives in choosing a couple of Old Etonians to be their leaders. Coincidence? Probably, but Etonians have always been good at smelling power. Two further straws in the wind to suggest that the age of the silly parties may now be with us?
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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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