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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Here’s a Washington Post story which shows that merely passing a law which makes privacy compulsory is not the whole answer to the problem of maintaining privacy:
The transplant patient was recovering well when doctors discovered that his new heart might have been infected with bacteria before the operation. When the doctors sought more information so they could give the man the right antibiotics, the hospital where the donor had died refused, citing new federal patient privacy rules.
“It was ridiculous. The only live part of the donor was in our patient,” said Deeb Salem, chief medical officer at the Tufts-New England Medical Center in Boston.
As it turned out, Salem’s patient was in no danger from the infection. But because the donor’s hospital refused to release any information, doctors were forced, as a precaution, to put the man on multiple antibiotics, potentially exposing him to dangerous side effects.
“It cost our patient the risk of being on multiple antibiotics for 12 to 15 hours, not to mention a lot of money,” Salem said.
Thanks to privacy.org for the link.
On the ITV Channel 4 news tonight I saw some of the more disturbing of news footage I have seen.
A cameraman points his camera at a group of US soldiers by a tank or other armoured vehicle. A soldier by the vehicle raises his gun and fires. You hear the crackle of rounds and see the muzzle flashes.
Then the camera drops to the ground. The cameraman was already dead.
One doesn’t have to look far to find all manner of carping about the current occupation of Iraq. Much of the carping lacks any broader perspective, and this lack of perspective leaves one at a loss as to how seriously to take, for example, anonymous reports of Iraqi citizens being abused by US soldiers. Setting aside the morally obtuse, who think we should have just left the Iraqis to the continued ministrations of Saddam and the Baathists, those critiques worth listening to at all generally boil down to a complaint about the competence of the occupying forces.
I think that we are seeing is an entirely predictable result of the fact that the American, and to a somewhat lesser degree the British, military forces are designed and operated as war-fighting forces. This is in sharp contrast to most other military forces in the world, which serve as a combination of welfare jobs programs and, in effect, domestic occupation forces. The US army, at least, does not prepare much for occupation work, perhaps because they find their time fully occupied preparing for their primary function of kicking the living crap out of the opposition force. Personally, I wouldn’t have it any other way.
War-fighting and occupation are famously incompatible with each other – one demands the rapid application of lethal force, the other the modulated escalation of minimum necessary force, etc. A war-fighting army cannot transition, on the fly, from war-fighting to occupation, at least not with the speed and efficacy now demanded of the US and British forces in Iraq.
See what conclusion you derive from the following assumptions:
- The West, as a matter of self-defense, will need to occasionally go in and change the regime of a foreign nation. Unless you retreat into pacifist fantasizing, I think that 9/11, not to mention WWII, demonstrates that, from time to time, militarily expedited regime change of hostile nations will occasionally be a necessity for the continued survival of even the most libertarian country.
- The occupation forces need to be operating at near pitch-perfect levels within a few days of the Dear Leader statues coming down. It is apparently now the case that, once the old regime is out the door, the victorious forces must have the place running at least as good as before, in jig time.
- The war-fighting forces cannot operate as an occupation force at satisfactory levels. The current conventional wisdom seems to be that successful post-war occupation requires administrators and enforcers that speak the language and are conversant with local customs spread throughout the country within a manner of weeks, if not days, and no heavy-handed policing or otherwise excessive uses of force allowed.
The only conclusion that I can draw is that the US, and possibly other Western nations, need to diversify their armed forces to include specialist occupation and civil administration units. Since many of the complaints about the occupation have to do with the lack of intimate familiarity with the Iraqi situation, we will need to have units training up to take over and run specific foreign nations years before hostilities actually break out.
Imagine the diplomatic possibilities! Will the French be offended because we don’t deem them enough of a threat to spin up a French occupation army group? Or will they be offended because we are planning to run France, for a bit, anyway?
The logic of sky-high expectations seems inescapable to me – self-defense requires regime change, which requires expert military occupiers and nation builders, which in turn requires detailed advance training in the language and customs of the nation to be uplifted.
The strategic and diplomatic consequences of going this route are, of course, disastrous. Even worse are the potential domestic effects – having a prefab military junta sitting around with nothing but time on its hands does not bode well for the domestic tranquility, does it?
Of course, in my view, this is all unnecessary if realistic expectations are maintained. Occupation is a tough business, one that will satisfy virtually no one no matter how well it is done. The Iraqis have complained, for example, that we don’t shoot looters on sight, and undoubtedly many of the ongoing problems with electricity and the oil industry have to do with the coalition trying to rule with a relatively light hand. But for every step we take toward greater enforcement and protection (more troops, more aggressive patrolling, shoot on sight policies, etc.), howls of protest will go up from both within and without Iraq.
The key, I think, is to keep your eye on progress towards the long-term goal and to maintain some minimal perspective on events. Sadly, in today’s partisan world of 24 hour news cycles, long-term thinking and perspective always run a poor second to political cheap shots and sensationalist video clips.
I think many will find this newspaper opinion piece of interest. It’s straight out of Iraq, by and for Iraqi’s.
It’s good to see the local view point of current events. I recommend reading other articles as well.
Here’s an interesting titbit of news, which I just got from following a trackback to something else to this guy (and his blog).
The Guardian is starting a blog devoted to the single issue of abolishing agricultural subsidies.
Today (Monday, August 18, 2003) with only a few weeks to go before the World Trade Organisation meets in Cancun the Guardian is launching a new website with a single aim:
Help the poorest countries by kicking into oblivion All Agricultural Subsidies
(kickAAS)
This is, you might say, lefties giving leftism a libertarian hook, to refashion one of Perry de Havilland’s most favoured memes. I say, good for them.
I’ve always felt that in the long run (okay, the very long run), if libertarianism (okay, the Samizdata meta-context) were ever to triumph in the UK, it would be via the Guardian and by outflanking the traditional right, which has always had a lively sense of the revolutionary and hence to them regrettable nature of the free market. Guardianistas are trouble-makers first and only socialist centralists second and because this makes trouble for smug establishmentarians. If there’s libertarian (Samizdata meta … etc.) trouble to be made, they’ll make that too.
The message is bound to get spread around in some very unlikely places, many of them very angry and hostile places for such a message, that state spending doesn’t work at achieving its publicly stated goals and most especially doesn’t work at making poor people richer.
I expect a lot of regular Guardian readers to be angry about this. Good.
I have been reading a remarkable book about a remarkable period in British history – the mid- to late 18th century – when a group of entrepreneurs, gifted amateur scientists and political radicals helped create the foundations of much of our modern industrial world.
The Lunar Men by Jenny Uglow, looks at the lives of a small but amazingly influential group of men, particularly the ceramics genius Josiah Wedgewood, pamphleteer and scientist Joseph Priestley, engineer Matthew Boulton, steam engine king James Watt, and medical doctor Erasmus Darwin. What jumps off the page is these men’s tremendous sense of drive and enthusiasm for acquiring and sharing knowledge. They were great polymaths, seeing no division between the pursuit of abstract knowledge and practical concerns of money making.
Most of these men were consciously outsiders, eccentrics and radicals ill at ease with the Anglican establishment. That sense of being ‘on the outside’ I think partly explains their drive to succeed. Most of them notably were unable for religious reasons to attend the main English universities of Cambridge and Oxford, often attending Scottish academies instead or bypassing such places altogether. And I was also struck by the sense of limitless possibility afforded by a country which at the time imposed very few restrictions and taxes on the public. 18th Century Britain was a bit like the Silicon Valley of the 1990s, with powdered wigs. Of course there were restrictive practises such as merchant gilds and duties on some imports, but that period surely came about as close to a genuine model of laissez faire capitalism as we have ever seen in our history.
There was much that was very bad and ugly about that period in our history, but also a great deal worth preserving and emulating today. The entrepreneurial gusto of these men is something we could surely use today. Glorious geeks indeed.
Here’s one trend that’s going the opposite from the US that’s actually good news for the Brits. A new private Accident & Emergency unit is to be opened this October in Brentford, West London. To non-British readers, that’s a private Emergency Room.
This has been widely reported as the first attempt to set up ER in the UK wrongly as it turns out. I contacted the BBC and the wording has changed to it claims to be the first. Obviously emergency healthcare in Britain existed before the state nationalized hospitals in 1948.
This report from 1998 shows that at least one serious attempt has been made to charge people for access to emergency healthcare in Britain. It failed for two reasons: the location was not ideal. The middle of Hampstead Heath is not the most obvious demand area for ER services and the Manor House Hospital (owned by a trade union) was sold to property developers.
The other interesting point in the BBC report is the view of the British Medical Association, the monopolistic body that represents the producer interests of doctors in the UK.
A Department of Health survey published in July found 6% of hospital patients waited at least 12 hours in A&E on a trolley or a chair. The government wants 90% of A&E patients to be assessed, treated, discharged or admitted within four hours. But doctors attending the British Medical Association’s annual conference in June denounced the target and said it would damage patient care.
So let me see if I have this straight – doctors believe that reducing the amount of time patients lie on trolleys or blood-splattered chairs in the waiting-room (I’ve sat on some of them), from 12 hours to four hours, being denied treatment, will damage patient care.
Dr Shipman I presume?
The BBC reports that two young British soldiers have saved the life of an abandoned newborn Iraqi girl after finding her in an ammunition dump.
Private Damien Kenny and Private Jonathan Hunt of the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment were searching a house in Basra after rounding up five terror suspects when they found two days old baby in a dusty 3ft-long padlocked metal box and nestling among rocket-propelled grenade launchers, AK47s and ammunition. Tightly swaddled and prematurely born, she was no longer breathing.
The squaddies began giving her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and a few minutes later Rose – named by the soldiers after the red rose of their Lancashire regiment – squeezed Private Kenny’s finger.
The Army was able to track her down and mother and daughter have been reunited in hospital. Lieutenant Craig Rogers, who is in charge of the unit which found Rose said:
The mother has actually said that it was the father who put the young child inside the ammunition box. He has been arrested by ourselves.
Four soldiers from the 1st Battalion The Queen’s Lancashire Regiment had chased armed Iraqi men into the house in the Al Jubaylah area of Basra early on Sunday following reports of looting at a local water treatment plant. They were arrested and the baby was found – along a large white bag containing one million Iraqi Dinars – in the subsequent routine search of the house.
And all this without a search warrant…!
Update: The first commenter in a fit of otherwise commendable paranoia against the BBC wants to wait for a confirmation. So far I have found Annanova reporting the same story pretty much verbatim. I shall keep searching…
Another update: And here is SkyNews with the same story. Here is CNN’s version of the same event.
Update: Ignore the previous updates. The author of this post has gone off the rails.
Who would have thought it? One of the main nutrition-industry opponents of the Atkins diet has had some of her research sponsored by the flour industry. Remarkable.
They really don’t like it up ’em, do they?, these nutritionists, who for years have been ordering us all to eat more low-fat (i.e. high carbohydrate) foods. And the Atkins diet is the bayonet up the bum they all secretly dread. For an entire industry of do-gooders, sponsored by the NHS and other tax-funded bodies, have made a fabulous living in the UK over the last two decades by sticking their noses into the things we eat, the fluids we drink, and the way we live.
And the news they don’t want anyone to hear is that it may be their advice, which has been causing all of the increasing obesity, because of their obsession with low-fat food. Manufacturers pack out these products with sugar, rice, and all the corn-syrup they can get their hands on. These overwhelm the poor old insulin-creating Islets of Langerhans, in the pancreas; the effects of this, according to Dr Atkins, are that we pile on weight and become addicted to carbs (sweets, beer, etc).
As well as causing obesity, particularly amongst children, the nutrition industry may also have created the huge rise in that dreadful silent killer disease, diabetes.
It’s not a pretty picture. And neither was I. Just after Christmas this year I topped 17st and 10lbs, and I was exhibiting what doctors call a pre-diabetic tendency (e.g. chain-eating packets of sweets). By God, that was some stomach, and in Winston Churchill’s famous phrase, that was some neck. But now, because of the late Dr Atkins, I’m 16st and 1lb. I was even better than this, at 15st 10lbs, but a recent reversion to ‘normal’ carb-loaded eating sent me back over the dreaded 16st barrier. So it’s back to Atkins, starting today, till we hit my fighting weight of 14st, though I’ll probably have some carb-relapses on the way, involving lager and curry, and it may take me a while.
So, to any anti-Atkins nutritionist, is it better I be nearly 18st, pre-diabetic, under blood pressure strain, and eating carb-laden low fat snacks, or 16st, not eating carbs, and a with significantly decreased obesity-related health risk? Hmmm…it takes me about 3.9 nanoseconds to work that one out. → Continue reading: Anti-Atkins do-gooder working for the flour industry
Salaam Pax is covering the story of how his friend, Baghdad photo blogger “G” was knocked about by US soldiers. Those in the know around the blogosphere have enjoyed “G’s” candid shots around Baghdad.
Here at Samizdata we don’t take kindly to our fellow bloggers getting roughed up. So whoever did it, go and apologize to him. NOW!
Well, I’m waiting!
Our Man in Basra has sent us a few quotes from locals before his next dispatch about Basra society.
Words from the streets of Basra:
For over 30 years we suffered under Saddam. No Arab, no Muslim country came to help us. Then America and Britain made political decision to get rid of Saddam. Now we should help the British.
From local Sheikh.
You should be more like the Americans and kill more Ba’athists.
After US killed Uday and Quasay and first time I heard anyone say we should be more like the Americans!
I am very happy that Uday and Quasay were killed but it is a pity they were not captured so they could be put on trial and tortured and then killed. Being killed like this was good for them.
The people here really hate Saddam and all his family and friends. It’s about the one thing everyone agrees on. When the news was confirmed that the evil sons were dead, the whole place was like 4th July in South L.A. In fact it was like watching TV footage of the nights Baghdad was bombed, there was tracer arching up into the sky from every direction you looked. Quite pretty to watch it sailing overhead, but a little worrying to see how many places all around us have automatic weapons to fire off, as well as all kinds of flares. And no shortage of ammo either. On the other hand these people must like us really, because we don’t get all that fired at us, and there’s a lot more civilians with guns here than there are soldiers. But basically, Saddam’s sons dead – party time. The only down notes I heard from anyone was “let’s get the rest”, and “pity they didn’t suffer more”. A lot of people wanted them put on trial but I don’t think a few years in prison and early parole for good behaviour was ever an option. Incidentally, one 12 year old boy sleeping on a roof seems to have been killed by falling fire, though we can’t be certain that was the reason – we had a few near misses. This prompts the thought that one of the first things Iraq really needs is some decent fireworks for celebrations. And don’t worry too much about the safety regs, just make them loud.
You British built Basra, you built the sewers, you taught us how to dress, how to eat, how to run the oil industry. We do not know the Americans, we think they are against the Muslims because of what they do, but we know you. Why do you not do now what you did in 1920 and 1941 and control this place and get rid of the bad men? Then Basra will be very rich for everyone.
By bad men this man meant Ba’athists, anti-CF, sheikhs, criminals and religious fundamentalists. There are quite a lot of anglophiles in Basra from the last time my Regiment was here in WW2 but of course you have to allow for them telling you what they think you want to hear…
Many of you probably know Burt Rutan drop tested the second stage of his suborbital passenger spaceplane on August 7th. You might be interested in some of the details of this historic event. White Knight, the first stage, was piloted by Brian Binnie with Cory Bird as co-pilot. SpaceShipOne flew with Mike Melvill at the controls.
The flight report states:
The space ship was launched at 47,000 feet and 105 knots, 10 nm east of Mojave. Separation was clean and positive with no tendency to roll off or pitch bobble. An initial handling qualities evaluation was very positive, supported close correlation to the vehicle simulator and with that confidence, the first flight test cards were executed as planned. The flight provided handling quality and performance data over 60% of the expected subsonic flight envelope from stall to 150 knots. Trim sensitivity, stick forces, control harmony and L/D performance were all as expected. The on-board avionics and energy management cueing displays performed flawlessly, the gear extension rapid, and the vehicle made a smooth touchdown at 7:56 local on Runway 30 at Mojave. The entire flight, from launch to landing, was viewable from the ground and SpaceShipOne with its unique planform was intriguing to watch as it cut gracefully through the air and was put through its paces.
The test flight time was 1.1 hours for White Knight and 19 minutes for SpaceShipOne.
The biggest thing between them and a first suborbital private launch on the Wright Brothers First Flight Anniversary in December is a pile of US Government forms. These will hopefully be processed in time as the bureaucrats involved are, from what I have heard, doing their best within what the system allows.
The process was begun very late… I will not go into details as I believe Rand Simberg may have discussed this earlier in the summer.
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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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