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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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As part of my continuing vow to be as nice as humanly conceivable towards our neighbours in France, I refer the readers of this blog to the following news item, purely for the purposes of conveying information, and not out of any desire to gloat over, denigrate or otherwise annoy the French.
Harry Potter has cast such a spell over the French that they are snapping up JK Rowling’s latest book in English, rather than waiting for the translation.
[…]
“It’s not exactly going to please the anti-globalisation movement,” noted literary magazine Livres Hebdo, which compiles and publishes the bestseller charts.
Heh. 
When Hong Kong was handed over to Communist China by the British state, to much joy and acclamation by credulous Chinese and Gweilos alike, the totalitarian gerontocracy in Peking pronounced soothingly that Hong Hong would retain its relatively liberal order under a doctrine ‘One nation, two systems’.
Tens of thousands of people have marched in protest at a planned anti-subversion law aimed at an EU style ‘harmonizing’ of Hong Kong law with that of the rest of Communist China. One nation, one system it would seem.
…the government is pushing through the national-security legislation, known as the “Article 23” measures, too quickly, and without enough public debate. The proposal is in many ways an attempt to bring Hong Kong’s laws regarding subversion, treason, sedition and the theft of “state secrets” in line with China’s.
Well it comes as no surprise to me that these patent lies only took six years to be revealed. I look forward to hearing the people who rejoiced at the surrender of Hong Kong’s people to China recanting their folly. I am not holding my breath however.
The Chinese way of dealing with effective protests
(WSJ link via Combustable Boy)
The Telegraph has an update about the vote in the House of Lords on the European Union curbs on the sale of vitamins and mineral food supplements.
Peers voted by a majority of 53 last night to call upon ministers to revoke regulations due to implement the EU’s Food Supplements Directive in August 2005. But Health Minister Lord Warner said the vote would make no difference.
The UK is obliged to implement the directive. Failure to transpose its requirements properly would be a serious breach of our obligations under the EC Treaty and would result in infraction proceedings against the UK and in the likelihood of our facing heavy fines. Ultimately, implementation would be forced upon us.
I don’t know whether the annual Glastonbury Music Festival is the world’s longest running or the world’s most famous music festival or whatever but it always attracts great heaving mobs of students and twenty-somethings.
For our enemies, this is a target-rich environment:
Bands play above a huge Greenpeace banner on the main stage, there are notices about Third World water supplies inside the toilets and organisers want every single person to sign a petition for fairer international trade laws.
On top of that, Tony Benn got a rock star’s welcome, a Palestinian group has brought an inflatable tank, Columbian trade unionists are planning to stage mock kidnappings of comedian Mark Thomas and singer Billy Bragg, and the Drop the Debt double decker bus is offering its bath to a lucky competition winner.
Depressing, isn’t it. Mind you, there’s always the risk of overkill:
“You notice it a lot but I don’t really take much interest it,” said Lisa Rush, 28, from Colchester.
Come the day we see a ‘Hayek Stall’ at a rock festival, we will truly know that we have turned a corner.
“The truth about market liberalisation and economic growth is not that it increases inequality, nor that it hurts the poor: just the opposite. Rather, the truth is that some large parts of the poor world are pulling themselves out of poverty while others are not.”
– The Economist
The quote is taken from an article in the Economist marking that publication’s 160th birthday. The Economist, even though it occasionally annoys me with its smart-ass tone, has been a fairly consistent voice of pro-free market liberal good sense since it first went to print in the Victorian age. It is worth clicking on the link and looking at the related articles in a whole series which the Economist devotes to celebrating liberal ideas.
And by “liberal”, I mean the word that would have been worn as a badge of pride by William Gladstone, Adam Smith or Milton Friedman, rather than those collectivists in drag in the U.S.
Happy Birthday, Economist!
I think that Hermann Rorschach was really onto something with that little inkblot test of his. If two different but apparently sane people can look at the same picture and see two entirely different things then perhaps that goes at least some way explaining ideology as well as psychology.
A perfect illustration of this lies in the response of British socialist bloggers to the plans for the regionalisation of England. This is the plan to divide England up into nine entirely artifical ‘sectors’ and give each its own assembly with regulatory functions. The details of this project are currently being thrashed out by the Office of Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott.
Over on the left, this is an eagerly awaited development. One of the new kids on the left-block, Farringdon Street, waxes lyrical:
The northwest is going to have a referendum on a regional assembly. This is a development that should be greeted with alacrity. While its chief protagonist in central government John Prescott hardly has a reputation as a constitutional iconoclast, devolution is vital to the reconstruction of British politics.
Power is to concentrated, the agenda to London centric. The regions especially those furthest from the capital need their own champions. We must increase the sheer amount of political muscle deployable in London and Brussels to advance the regional interest.
And he is far from alone in his enthusiasm. It is sincerely shared by the rest of British left all of whom appear to be getting moist-knickered and dewey-eyed over what they are trying to present as ‘decentralisation’.
Now, if this really was a process of decentralisation it might have some merit. At the very least it would be worthy of further discussion. But this is not a process of decentralisation. Not even to the smallest degree. → Continue reading: Top down and down and down
If you walk into a large store of virtually any kind in Australia, you will see a sign just outside the door saying. “It is a condition of entry to this story that customers allow us to inspect the contents of their bags on leaving the shop”. Typically, when you leave the shop, there is a security guard outside the door who asks to inspect the contents of your bag. Virtually all customers open their bag, the guard looks inside the bag, and then the customers go on their way.
When growing up in Australia, I simply thought that this was the natural order of things. I never really thought about this as a violation of my privacy until I spent some time living in England in the 1990s. In England, such searches do not occur, presumably because either the British interpretation of the law is that they are not legal or the law is different. (I think that we are likely dealing different interpretations of the same common law here). When I returned to Australia, I suddenly became much more aware of bag searches in stores than had been the case before. And I became much more protective of my rights. I found that I was very unwilling to let anyone look in whatever bags I might be carrying.
Legally, the case for allowing such bag searches is flimsy. Without probable cause (which in practice usually means someone will have to have seen you take something off the shelf of the shop and put it in your bag) the shop has no right to detain you or to look in your bag. However, they can ask to look in your bag. You then have the right to refuse. If you refuse the shop can then ask you to not come back to the shop again, but they have no way of actually compelling you to open your bag for them.
→ Continue reading: Bag searches in Australian stores
Andy Duncan decries the bigotry of Members of Parliament in persecuting a minority.
Backbench Labour MPs have voted for a total ban on hunting with dogs. What remains very unclear, however, is what happened to the government’s murky ‘compromise’ option, to allow licensed hunting to continue.
This disappeared due to a mysterious House of Commons drafting error, and a warning to Labour whips, that the Parliament Act could not be used with a total ban. But for a government of control freaks, this seems a mere fig-leaf covering over the traces of some kind of deal between the backbench and the executive of the “You support us, when we need you, and we’ll give you the Ban” type.
Or does it? Could it be even more labyrinthine than this simple conspiracy theory? You may remember last week Mr Peter Hain, our friend from Wales, attempting a complex manoeuvre to kick the Hunting Ban into the long grass. The last thing New Labour needs, with the Tories moving into a fragile lead in the polls, is to cement this lead with a class-war move highly unpopular within Middle England. With the Countryside Alliance able to get 400,000 people to march down Whitehall any time of their choosing, my guess is Tony Blair would rather this problem went away, until he is at least dealt with Iraqgate.
Time will tell what this über-manipulative government is up to, but my guess is that the ban will fail again, in this session of Parliament, due to some “technical error”, and we will be back to where we started, next year, for the whole sorry mess to begin again. You would think they had a majority of ten, the way New Labour carry on, rather than over one hundred. It must be terrible being a socialist back-bencher lion, being led by such donkeys. Excellent.
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