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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I have just received my new passport. I am not British, and I will be deliberately vague about the country that issued it. The fee for getting it renewed was significantly higher than last time. I do like the nice touch of requiring me to pay a “priority fee” for getting the new passport in a reasonable time. The idea that we should help our citizens by being prompt and efficient in the first place is gone completely.
Upon receiving the passport, I perhaps discovered the reason for the higher fee. The passport has a little logo of a chip on the front cover and on the details page. There is an insert stating that “This is an ePassport. This passport contains a microchip which stores the same information that as appears on the data age. The chip can be read electronically to confirm the identity of the bearer. This document complies with International Civil Aviation Organisation standards and incorporates security features to prevent illegal access to the information stored on the chip. See the centre page of the passport for further information”.
My country is the sort of place that tends to be proud of being first on the block with respect to implementing fancy new international protocols, so I suppose this does not greatly surprise me. If the chip only contains the same data as the details page, then I rather fail to see the point, given that the passport is machine readable already. If the intention is to add more data to such chips later, I am not sure that the present “This is just a new way of storing the same data” claims are entirely honest. Storing digitally signed data on the chip probably does make sense and genuinely does make such a passport harder to forge. So I will concede that point.
Still, making it possible to read the passport without requiring it to be opened seems to me to rather reduce my security rather than increase it. As for the security features to prevent illegal access, surely for technology to be useful it must be made possible for every border post in every country in the world to be able to obtain equipment for reading it. Even if I made the ludicrous assumption that I trust every government in the world, I still find it hard to believe that such a widely distributed technology would not fall into private hands.
So, where from here. Well, as it happens I can turn to the centre page of the passport. This page is stiffer than the others, presumably due to having a chip embedded in it. It also has information written on it. “This passport contains sensitive electronics. For best performance, please do not bend, perforate, or expose to extreme temperatures or excess moisture”.
So, which of those things should I try first?
Hysterical Guardian readers are getting absurdly upset. The reason? A member of the Samizdata team suggested that a new tax on prestige cars was more about the politics of envy than saving the planet.
The downfall of Eliot Spitzer has recently been celebrated on this blog, and rightly so. However, I believe the major casualty of the affair will prove to be Hillary Clinton, rather than Spitzer. This juicy scandal will deliver the Democratic nomination to Obama. You could almost – almost – feel sorry for Clinton; the press was only just starting to crack the shiny Obama veneer, when this had to go and happen. Who will pay any attention to Rezko and co. with this circus unfolding over the next few weeks? It will suck the oxygen right out of Hillary’s campaign at the critical juncture – just when it was catching fire.
Not that Obama as the Democratic candidate will necessarily be a bad thing for the Republicans; the more I see and read of him, his views and his actions, the more I am convinced that Obama08 is John McCain’s smoothest path to the White House.
If I was a believer, I would be pouring a thankful libation right about now. Eliot Spitzer, one of the most nasty power crazed politicos in US politics today, perhaps second only to Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmondson in authoritarian thuggishness, has just shown that he who lives by the judicial sword, can oh so easily die by the judicial sword. To see a man who thought nothing of using the power of the state to intimidate those who dared cross him get caught in a Federal wiretap is… well… sweet. I love the smell of schadenfreude in the morning.
Update: heh… just found an article in the New York Times which has almost the same title and sentiments 
Update 2: oh this gets better and better… not only has he resigned apparently, it is causing dyspepsia for his statist confrères at the Huffington Post. Happy days indeed.
Iran is also the theatre of very optimistic developments. Hashem Aghajari is an Islamic revolutionary-turned-history-professor. He was one of the student activists of 1979 who later fully participated in the brutal repression after Khomeini’s coming to power. He is now challenging the infallibility of the ruling mullahs and calls upon Iranians to think for themselves instead of blindly accepting whatever is preached in Friday sermons, a piece of advice for which he has been sentenced to death. But he is now supported by the students and professors at most of the country’s universities and thousands of ordinary citizens, workers, and cultural leaders.
Where Aghajari wants to reform Islam; the students want a total separation between mosque and state. He wants an Islamic Reformation, but the demonstrators are interested in the creation of a secular civil society. He is a reformer, but they are revolutionaries.
– Ibn Warraq who is both optimistic (as in the above quote) and pessimistic (as elsewhere in the same piece) about whether the Muslim world can become civilised
Michael Totten’s latest bloggage from Iraq is as informative as ever, but the thing that fascinated me most was a brief but interesting discursion into the use of the English word ‘Supermarket’ on a sign in a small town in Iraq.
What struck me about the sign on that store, and on many other stores in Iraq, was the English word “supermarket.” The only people in Saqlawiya who find English helpful are the Marines. And me.
I’ve seen this far beyond Iraq. Even in small towns in Libya – one of the most closed societies in the world – I found store signs in English. The amount of English in a genuinely cosmopolitan city like Beirut is even more striking, though no longer surprising. Beirut, at least, has a huge tourist industry. Imagine how differently you would think about Arabic civilization if small towns in Kansas and Nebraska – not to mention large cities like New York and Chicago – had storefront signs in the Arabic language even though no Arabs live there. Perhaps the word “imperialism” wouldn’t seem so much like a stretch. Of course no one forces Iraqis or Libyans to put English words on their signs, so it’s telling that they do so anyway, and that they did not choose Chinese or Russian.
I disagree with Michael’s use of the word ‘imperialism’ and I think he answers that point himself in the very next sentence. An even more demotic variation on the inexplicable prevalence of English puzzled me many years ago BB (Before Blogging). I spent some time in a few fairly rough parts of Croatia and one can hardly miss the prevalence of racist and sexist graffiti on the communist-era concrete tower blocks. The odd thing is that mixed in with the usually ‘Jebi Se’ varient epithets in Croatian, you will find floridly racist threats or extravagant anatomical references in more or less grammatically correct English. And this in an area that was not exactly a magnet for English speaking tourists, particularly in the middle of the then on-going war.
The huge number of people who speak English in Croatia can be easily explained by the ubiquity of satellite dishes, which is why I often referred to the local Croatian English dialect as MTV English. But that does not answer the question of why in a linguistically and ethnically homogeneous area (such as unlovely New Zagreb in Croatia or Saqlawiya in Iraq), people use written English when there is no commercial or political pressures to do so.
Interesting.
A lot of elections at the moment. Besides the US elections, we have just had the Spanish elections and in my wife’s small country, Malta, the ruling Nationalist Party, a vaguely right-of-centre party that supported Malta’s entry into the EU and the euro, won by an incredibly slender margin (just over a thousand votes). As I have a vested interest in Malta remaining a broadly open country, I am glad that the party won, or at least relieved that Labour, the main opposition party with a vindictively regulatory streak, did not. But my views on Malta’s election are tinged with a bitter-sweet taste as the Nationalists, for all their generally pro-enterprise views, have made serious errors. The party took Malta into the EU. By staying out of the EU, Malta could have retained and expanded its status as an offshore tax haven, providing Monaco, the Swiss, Liechtenstein and Gibraltar with some useful competition as a friendly venue. Malta has quite a thriving IT and financial sector and English is widely spoken there, a priceless advantage. By keeping out of the EU, it could also have avoided becoming a conduit for tens of thousands of illegal immigrants who use the small island as an entry point for the EU. Malta, an island the size of the Isle of Wight with half a million people, is not a country that can easily absorb a large influx. But as my better half points out, Malta, a Catholic country, has long feared the shadow of its Muslim neighbour, Libya, just a hundred miles or so to the south, and sees EU membership as somehow tying it ever more closely to a non-Muslim population. The Maltese are quite a tolerant bunch but they are fiercely pro-western. The Archbishop of Canterbury would be thrown into Valetta’s Grand Harbour.
One reason for the closeness of the elections is that there is a lot of anger at the governing party, even among most moderate voters, at some of the crasser building developments in the densely populated island. Even the most ardent defender of free enterprise will sometimes struggle to defend the ugly high-rise developments in part of the island that have gone up next to the attractive, honey-coloured buildings along parts of the country (in the smaller neighbouring island of Gozo, such developments have been far fewer, thankfully). Tourism is a crucial source of income for Malta; its historic buildings are part of its appeal, so long-term tourist entrepreneurs should hopefully follow their self-interest and avoid damaging the very thing that makes Malta a nice place to visit. This is an interesting subject for economists: ugly developments make money for investors in the short run and arguably, are better than no development at all, but the long run costs can be in the form of less tourism overall as would-be visitors go elsewhere for somewhere prettier.
Anyway, back on topic: this has to have been one of the closest election results I have ever read about.
History is the oppression of the weak by the strong.
The editor of The Spectator, Matthew d’Ancona, is not what you would call a combative journalist. I tend to feel that the Spectator, while still a highly readable publication these days, has tended sometimes to tag along a bit too tamely behind the Cameron/Brown consensus, although the magazine retains its robust elements, not to mention that entertaining if rather self-parodying old card, Taki.
What the Spectator thinks of Gordon Brown may not count for much outside the Westminster village of media/political junkies, but I reckon this ferocious column by d’Ancona about the government’s repulsive behaviour over the recent EU Constitution, sorry, Treaty, represents quite a shift. Whatever respect that d’Ancona used to voice about Brown has disappeared. I have never read anything so sharp by d’Ancona before. The trouble is, that it has taken far too long for the truth to dawn on even supposedly cynical media commentators that Brown is not a man of honour or principle. The mistake is to think that because he is Scottish, dour, unable to do the Blairite Dianaesque rhetoric, that he is therefore somehow more ‘solid’ or ‘honest’ than the actor-manager that he replaced. The truth, alas, is quite different. Brown is just another machine politician.
[Samantha] Power is gone now – but not for the odd article this post points to. No the lady was fired because she said (to a journalist for ‘The Scotsman’) that Hillary Clinton was a monster who would do anything for power.
In short the lady was dismissed for telling the truth. After all the Democrats have to kiss and make up at some point.
– Paul Marks
It appears that courts in the USA feel it is perfectly all right to issue a search warrant to raid someone’s house on the basis of higher-that-average electricity use. The linked example happened a few years ago but I gather it is not all that unusual a basis for a search in the Land of the Free. Presumably as I often have five computers running that is the sort of thing that would attract the attention of The Fuzz in the USA too.
I also noticed that the search warrant allows them to search for ‘firearms’… so is possession of a firearm a criminal offence in the People’s Republic of California these days?
There is an amusing article in The Observer magazine today called The world’s 50 most powerful blogs which deigns to list our crazed (but correct) rantings here, I am pleased to say.
Samizdata is one of Britain’s oldest blogs. Written by a bunch of anarcho-libertarians, tax rebels, Eurosceptics and Wildean individualists, it has a special niche in the political blogosphere: like a dive bar, on the rational side of the border between fringe opinion and foam-flecked paranoid ranting. Samizdata serves its opinions up strong and neat, but still recognisable as politics. On the other side of the border, in the wilderness, the real nutters start.
Least likely to post ‘I’d say it’s six of one, half a dozen of the other’
Such lists are of course highly subjective and whilst I am happy to see Samizdata numbered amongst new media’s Golden Horde, there is a howling error, indeed it is a glaring radioactive glow-in-the-dark omission… where the hell is INSTAPUNDIT?
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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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