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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Claire Berlinski and Alex Singleton at
the Second British Blogger Bash
Oscar Pistorius is a South African who has had the lower half of both his legs amputated, and participates in atheletic events with the use of artificial limbs. He has been banned from this year’s Olympic Games because the International Association of Atheletic Federations has rules that his artificial legs give him a ‘significant advantage’ over his able-bodied rivals. He uses carbon fibre blades to race.
A study, carried out by Professor Peter Bruggeman at the German Sport University in Cologne, compared Pistorius with five able-bodied athletes of similar ability.
“Pistorius was able to run with his prosthetic blades at the same speed as the able-bodied sprinters with about 25 percent less energy expenditure,” the report concluded.
This is a small but significant point where an athelete using artificial limbs now has an advantage over normal-bodied atheletes. I doubt that his artificial limbs give him an advantage in day to day life, but in this narrow field, Pistorius does seem to get an edge. I think this is going to be the start of a wider trend.
Ministers are planning to implant “machine-readable” microchips under the skin of thousands of offenders as part of an expansion of the electronic tagging scheme that would create more space in British jails.
Amid concerns about the security of existing tagging systems and prison overcrowding, the Ministry of Justice is investigating the use of satellite and radio-wave technology to monitor criminals.
But, instead of being contained in bracelets worn around the ankle, the tiny chips would be surgically inserted under the skin of offenders in the community, to help enforce home curfews. The radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, as long as two grains of rice, are able to carry scanable personal information about individuals, including their identities, address and offending record.
This is beyond belief, or, at least, it would be if we had not been covering the various madcap schemes coming out of Whitehall the past few years. What we have here is a government that believes that the rights and liberties of its people ought to be ordered to suit the priorities of British police forces.
Now if you take this to be a good idea, you are going to be hard pressed to deny the logical conclusion, that if we were all implanted with RFID tags, it would be much easier to solve and prevent crimes in the first place. This is very probably true, but it also degrades the individual to the point where humans become mere vassals of the almighty British State.
Given the trend of affairs in the UK, that is probably the way things are going to go- give it a decade or two. Early adapters should get themselves arrested and tagged early, to beat the rush.
The Daily Telegraph asks:
“Just what do chalet girls get up to?”
I have been skiing several times and judging by the partying I er, saw (honest, guv), quite a good deal. As for the chaps, well…
Ron Paul is the least objectionable Republican. The second-least objectionable Republican is Fred Thompson, and if he were likely to win the nomination I might be persuaded to switch my support. All the ones who are likely to win are indistinguishable from Democrats (and some of them are Democrats on Fire for Jesus which is just all kinds of not a good idea).
– Blogger and serial commenter Joshua
Apparently, the reason Senator Hillary Clinton (New York) won the recent New Hampshire Democratic party US presidential primary was as follows:
No, it appears at this early stage of analysis that the pieces were in place for this win all along, and that the “secret weapon” of the Clinton campaign was their field program to significantly boost turnout with their strongest demographic, single women and women with less than a college degree.
I wonder what we should call “single women and women with less than a college degree”? Not “Soccer Moms” obviously. I have a horrible feeling I know what Chris Rock would call them…
BTW, I note there are no Samizdata category sections for “witchcraft” or “elections”. This might be a case for either or both.
I, Perry Anthony de Havilland, hereby declare that in the event I die and my body comes into the possession of the State, under no circumstances whatsoever may the State, in the form of the National Health Service or any other component of the State, harvest my organs on the grounds of implied consent. I explicitly and absolutely refuse consent for my organs to be harvested.
This is because the State’s plan to assume default ownership of my mortal remains is wholly and monstrously unacceptable. I reject the claim of the State to own my body just as I reject the legitimacy of its various claims to own my person whilst I am alive. Consent to harvest my organs for medical purposes may, however, be granted (or refused) by my designated next of kin, and no one else.
The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency has been in Tehran talking to the regime there about it’s nuclear program. He asked a few questions about Iran’s intentions. The response? We’ll get back to you- see you next month.
“We will try to solve all the outstanding questions by mid-February before Mohamed ElBaradei presents his report in March to the Board of Governors,” the head of Iran’s atomic energy organisation Gholam Reza Aghazadeh told the ISNA news agency.
“We are hoping that all the past and present questions about our dossier will be solved and that we will return to a normal situation,” Mr Aghazadeh said.
If Iran’s intentions are within the parameters set by the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, why will it take Iran a month to answer the IAEA’s questions?
The decision to go nuclear has exposed the whole environmental cause for what it is: not a well intentioned drive for clean power but a spiteful, mean-spirited drive for less power. Because less power hits richer countries and richer people the hardest.
I’ve argued time and again that the old trade unionists and CND lesbians didn’t go away. They just morphed into environmentalists. The red’s become green but the goals remain the same. And there’s no better way of achieving those goals than turning the lights out and therefore winding the clock back to the Stone Age. Only when we’re all eating leaves under a hammer and sickle will they be happy.
I’m serious. All the harebrained schemes for renewable energy are popular among Britain’s beardies only because they don’t work.
– Jeremy Clarkson
I have written before of the nationalisation of politics in Great Britain. In short, I think Peter Oborne’s thesis in the the Political Class is almost right, but back to front. We are much closer to the authoritarian “no-party state” advocated by Brian Crozier, realised, however by Djilas’ New Class sucking up consumerism and the New Left rather than through caudillo-corporatism. But I did not realise it had gone so far: how much the constitution has changed in that particular respect the last decade; how much in public discourse the government and the governing party are now identified.
Peter Hain MP is in trouble. His inexplicably luxuriantly financed campaign for the deputy leadership of the Labour Party, turns out not to have counted over £100,000 in donations. It is all over the newspaper and the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, and the Electoral Commission are both investigating. I’m sorry? Apparently the failure to account is a criminal offence. It what?
Now maybe it couldn’t happen to a nicer bloke, Mr Hain (an African by birth) having moved from being the leader of the Anti-Apartheid Campaign in the UK in his twenties to one of the leading advocates of a new pass-law system for his adopted country. But I am outraged on his behalf in this case.
Someone has to be. All Mr Hain has done is to say he was too busy to notice the alleged offences being carried out in his name, not challenge, as the younger man would have done, the ludicrousness of the context. All the media has done is have vapours about the wickedness of using money to send leaflets and not reporting it to officials, and ridicule the poor man’s “orange” complexion in a way they would think disgusting and itself borderline criminal if he were an ethnically darker African.
Maybe I have not been paying enough attention, but I have not read anywhere yet the obvious point. … → Continue reading: Party = state?
The ballot initiative to end the income tax in Massachusetts has survived the challenges of some of the State’s worst tax whores and will be on the ballot this fall. If you live there, brace yourself for a cacophony of awesomely silly claims. You will soon be hearing the schools will close, your children will grow up to be heroin addicts, your pets will die of Ebola and the Atlantic Ocean will rise and smite thy town should you have the temerity to vote ‘yes’ in spite of the warnings of your betters.
Do you think I am kidding? The Governor of that State has already tried to relate tax repeal and Darfur. I kid you not. According to Jeff Jacoby:
So Governor Deval Patrick is cranking up the rhetoric. He told the Associated Press last week that undoing the income tax is “just a dumb idea” that would utterly devastate Massachusetts.
“Patrick said he has lived in places with no taxes, including the time he spent in Darfur 30 years ago,” AP’s Steve LeBlanc reported. “He says there were also no bridges, no good roads, and no public safety there. ‘Civilization costs something,’ he said. ‘If we could have something for nothing, which is the fiction that has been sold by the right for some time now, then we wouldn’t have a $19 billion upkeep backlog for the roads and bridges.’ “
You have loads of time to tell your friends and neighbors about this Initiative. Get out the vote and give the Statists their head on a platter this November.
Ezra Levant is not someone I had heard of before but I already take my hat off to the man. He has been summoned before a kangaroo court in Alberta to answer for daring to publish the Mohammed Cartoons in 2006.
His opening remarks to the absurdly named ‘Alberta Human Rights Commission’ are, quite simply, pure uncompromising brilliance. Read the whole article yourself as no mere snippet can do them justice.
Update: go to the root Ezra Levant site and watch the videos. Oh. My. God. The man is simply magnificent. Watch and learn. It is a master class in confronting the enemies of liberty. Head on.
I invite people to do what I just did… if you feel Ezra Levant speaks for you too, go to his site and drop your mouse on the button ‘Donate to fight the HRC’ to help defray his legal costs. Put your money where Ezra’s mouth is.
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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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