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.
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I quite often stumble across snippets of news which touch upon so many big themes and ideas that they would easily support an entire political thesis. As it is, and as it’s blogging here, I shall confine my comments to the mere immediate and obvious.
And I suppose the most obvious conclusion to be drawn from this item is that the Home Office is not the only department of government to have embraced the desire for ID cards:
The Department of Health yesterday called for the use of identity cards to prove entitlement to free care as it acted to put an end to “health tourism” – the exploitation of NHS loopholes by visitors from abroad.
To avoid problems of racial discrimination everyone would have to show their card before they received non-emergency treatment.
In the meantime the prospect of proving identity or residency by showing a passport or a utility bill is being considered.
No surprises there really. HMG is running out of money so cutbacks in largesse are the order of the day (okay, today) and, in the first instance, that means no more free health-care for foreigners. In the fullness of time this restriction will extend to the elderly, children and, quite possibly, the sick.
We also now know (as if we didn’t already suspect) that ID cards are not just Mr.Blunkett’s obsession but a technocratic fetish that has gripped our entire governing elite. I wholly expect to see successive government departments producing their own niche raisons d’ID card’ over the coming months.
There is a damn good argument that can be used to undermine the state here but, in order to wield it effectively, our friends on the left are going to have to embrace that time-honoured (but generally despised) libertarian truism about public ‘services’ eventually becoming public ‘masters’.
‘Free’ ends up being very expensive.
You don’t have to hold an anti-interventionist stance regarding Iraq to feel mighty queasy about this story in the Washington Post, which covers a case where the U.S. Army seized the family of an Iraqi officer, threatening to hold the family until the person concerned co-operated with the Army’s requests.
Lovely. If the coalition wants to hand propaganda material on a plate to those who would have preferred Saddam to remain in charge than that we should have liberated that country, then this sort of thing is just ideal.
I hope the persons responsible are dealt with harshly for this.
And I don’t want lots of comments about how “Pearce has turned into a peacnik idiot yada-yada”. Kidnapping is wrong. Period.
The Guardian reports that the government wants biometric iris-recognition machines installed in ten UK airports within a year.
The scanners will probably be welcomed by regular travellers for “speeding them past immigration queues”. Simply look the machine in the eye and say goodbye.
How many will consider the privacy ramifications of saving a few minutes at the airport? Are we to believe that once a big enough database is established these machines will not spread?
How long before we are scanned every time we enter a public place and that information recorded centrally? All to protect society, of course.
It seems Big Blunkett is determined to get us all on file by any means necessary.
The Pentagon funded research agency DARPA are launching something called the Policy Analysis Market (PAM) which is in its own words…
A Market in the Futures of the Middle East..
and will provide…
insight into the interactions among Middle Eastern and U.S. interests and policy decisions.
This is done by letting you trade…
on data indices that track economic health, civil stability, military disposition, and U.S. economic & military involvement in Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Turkey.
…as well as other contracts. There has been some opposition to the idea. Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Byron Dorgan of North Dakota have urged the Pentagon to drop the idea stating that…
The idea of a federal betting parlour on atrocities and terrorism is ridiculous and it’s grotesque.
and …
useless, offensive and unbelievably stupid.
Trading begins October 1st
I used to be a Mr Angry of Henley-On-Thames, whenever I listened to Radio Pravda’s Today program, but now I listen strictly for laughs, particularly since the New Labour machine and the BBC started sniping at each other, in their bloody marxist schism. And today did we have a humdinger.
Their reporter, Nicola Stanbridge, went out with some Environment Agency rubbish inspectors (no, I’m afraid I’m not kidding), to find out what they’ve been getting up to, out there in the real world, on their taxpayer-funded salaries. It turns out that organised crime is now running massive fly-tipping operations, in the UK, as it gets rid of waste for cash-strapped companies more cheaply than “proper” waste disposal agencies. I can’t remember the text, word for word, but it went something like this:
Reporter: So here we are in Birmingham, standing on a pile of smelly fly-tipped rubbish. What are we looking for?
Rubbish Inspector: Any refuse with names and addresses on it, like water bills.
Reporter: What do you do with it?
Rubbish Inspector: We bag it, and tag it, and then invite those named to an interview, under caution, where we investigate why their names and addresses have been found in illegally fly-tipped rubbish. If they cannot provide a satisfactory explanation, we prosecute them.
Okay, so far, it wasn’t too bad, at least, not for a draconian state like the UK with civil “servants” who love threatening people, and a country mired in increasing petty regulation, with 1 in 4 of the working population engaged in “services” for the government. And I’ve no love for organised criminals, particularly those who dump hazardous waste onto private property. But then it got really interesting, as back in the studio, they interviewed the chief executive of the Environment Agency (I bet that’s a nice salary). The Today programme wanted to know why this had only become a problem in the last few years. This was the gist of the reply: → Continue reading: Terminator IV: Rise of the rubbish inspectors
‘The British police are the best in the world’.
Believe it or not, that was a phrase I heard all the time when I was growing up. It was repeated so often and with such unshakeable conviction that it practically entered the folklore. The police were seen as the very embodiment of the British belief in ‘firmness but fairness’ and their stewardship of a remarkably pacific country was as much a given feature of life as clement weather or fertile topsoil.
I do not know whether or not it has ever been true but I can understand the reasons why it was so widely believed. There was a time when the British police were charged with enforcing reasonable laws (in what was equally widely assumed to be the ‘freest country in the world’) and they managed to do so with reasonable efficiency while maintaining a public image of politeness and deference. British ‘bobbies’ were seen as less ‘trigger-happy’ and ‘gung-ho’ than their US counterparts and less corrupt and brutal than their European ones.
Does this axiom hold water today? Someone should ask the staff of Huntingdon Life Sciences:
Staff who work for HLS, the animal laboratory, have been under attack for four years. But the violence is about to become a lot worse, reports Andrew Alderson
On Thursday, 1,200 company employees will be sent a short, factual e-mail by their management. It will warn them that animal rights activists are planning a 48-hour weekend of action from midnight on August 1 and staff should take extra care over their safety at home.
For two days and nights, employees of Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS) will face an even greater likelihood of having bricks thrown through their windows, their cars covered in paint-stripper, incendiary devices put through their letter boxes and hooded men attacking them as they walk from the car to the front door.
→ Continue reading: Left twisting in the wind
All governments love boasting about their achievements and HMG is no exception. A particular favourite boast for the current lot is how many jobs they have created since they came to power. Sounds good, doesn’t it.
But there is a whole world of difference between job creation and wealth creation. In fact, the two things can be mutually exclusive:
Labour has hired 344,000 extra people to work for the Government since it took office, with the state now employing 5.3m people, or one in five of the workforce, according to figures released yesterday.
Until Labour was elected, the government payroll had fallen for 15 years, mostly thanks to the privatisations of the 1980s, but that is now being reversed by a massive public spending spree funded from tax rises.
Tony Blair and Gordon Brown are overseeing a hiring bonanza. Hundreds of thousands are joining the public sector, especially in the National Health Service, where 160,000 more staff have been taken on. The NHS now employs about 1.3m people, reputed to be more than any other civilian organisation in the world apart from the Indian railway.
If those people working in the shrinking private sector want to know exactly why they have to hand over more of their income and savings every year to their government, I suggest that they look here for an answer.
This from the BBC:
Eavesdroppers, including stalkers and jealous spouses, are listening in on hundreds of thousands of private conversations in Britain every week because of a legal loophole, BBC News Online has discovered.
Telephone tapping without a valid warrant is illegal under both the 1998 Wireless Telegraphy Act and the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000.
The law relating to intrusive surveillance devices – bugs – is less clear.
But it is legal to trade in taps, bugs and covert cameras, which explains the myriad websites, mail order businesses and spy shops.
And so on.
I’m a libertarian and I don’t quite know what I think about all that. I mean, I’m in favour of trades of all kinds, including lots of trades that other people aren’t in favour of. I think, for example, that it ought to be legal to buy a small and sneaky camera, if you want to buy one and if someone wants to sell you one. It’s a bit like guns. It’s what you do, and in this particular case it’s also where you do it, that matters, not the mere owning or buying of the thing itself.
But my attitude to posting on White Rose is: if it’s of interest and relevance, stick it up. I’m trying to give the customers here, that is to say the people the editors here want to be the customers here, what they want. No doubt they’ll straighten me out if I’m doing it wrong.
Tony Martin, a farmer jailed five years for the “crime” of shooting two burglars – but only managing to kill one – has been set free.
His case is so notorious even the present government is considering changes in the law. On tonight’s news there was intimation of a new law to ban nonsense suits by criminals against defending homeowners. There may even be a broadening of the UK legal definition of self-defense.
Under current standards in the UK, self-defense is almost non-existent, so anything is a vast improvement.
Lift a jar or three to the heroic farmer Martin tonight! Later, when you visit the bog and return them from whence they came, do so in remembrance of the unmanned and unfortuneately surviving second thief.
Killing the Terrorism Information Awareness program is very much akin to killing a vampire. You can stick a stake in the heart of a vampire and it will die. But pull that stake out, and it will spring back to life.
– Steve Lilienthal in his CNSNews.com commentary Protecting Law-Abiding Citizens
Declan McCullagh has a commentary on CNET News.com about privacy in the post-9/11 US. He concludes:
It’s unclear what will happen next. One possibility is that Americans honestly may be so fed up with privacy invasions that they demand that their elected representatives do something. The tremendous interest in the national do-not-call list supports that idea, as does the conspicuous lack of congressional support for the Justice Department’s proposed sequel to the USA Patriot Act.
Another possibility is that the report on Sept. 11–prepared by the two most clandestine committees in Congress and released last week–may lead to more efficient surveillance techniques. Two key findings say the National Security Agency did not want others to think it was conducting surveillance domestically, so it limited its eavesdropping, even against spooks or terrorists inside the United States. The report concludes that the NSA’s policy “impeded domestic counter-terrorist efforts.”
What the report doesn’t say is what should be done about terrorism–and whether that would swing the privacy pendulum back in the other direction.
Veteran space tourist Dennis Tito is ready to invest in a suborbital spaceship… but he is worried the FAA is going to regulate them like aeroplanes. He and others are worried this would kill the infant industry:
Jeff Greason, president of the Mojave, Calif.-based XCOR Aerospace, testified before the panel that holding suborbital vehicles like the one his company has in development to the same standards as airplanes would ensure that commercial space flight never gets off the ground.
In aviation, Greason said, the FAA’s focus is on keeping planes in the sky. When it comes to rocketry, the FAA assumes that the launch vehicle will fail and places most of the regulatory burden on ensuring that adequate measures have been taken to safeguarding people on the ground.
Greason called on lawmakers to help ensure that reusable launchers are treated as rockets, not as aircraft, as some in the FAA would prefer.
“If we insist on perfect safety at the beginning of the industry, we will get it, because no one will ever fly.” Greason said.
Perhaps one of our readers will drop in and expound on this at length. (wink, wink, nudge, nudge Jeff)
This link from Xcor points to the written testimony.
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