After a short hiatus due to snail mail from Basra involving wrong addresses and the usual off-line world confusions I give you the forth letter written by our illustrious ‘Man in Basra’. The following has been written partially as a response to
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August 15th, 2003 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Virginia Postrel’s latest NY Times column highlights what may become a growing weakness in the regulatory state.
As the info-industrial economy advances, the regulatory state will look increasingly out of step and, one hopes, irrelevant and undesirable. Regulation is all about conformity, and while top down conformity might appear to be tolerable in a society that is struggling to make ends meet, one hopes that it will become increasingly intolerable as it becomes more of a barrier to the kinds of pleasure-seeking and self-realization that people are willing to go to great lengths to achieve when they have the means to do so. As Ms. Postrel points out, the pricing mechanism of the market lets people pursue these essentially aesthetic ends as far as they want (or can afford), while top-down policy-driven efficiencies all too often preclude these pursuits. Future debates over the regulatory state may play out as a struggle between the competing values of risk-aversion and efficiency on the one hand, and self-individuation and aesthetics on the other. August 15th, 2003 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
To follow up on the discussion under Good news on guns, which drifted (and I do mean drifted) into comparisons of US and European crime and the unfortunate concentration of violent criminal activity in the US in the black community, I ran across a summary of statistics at the Useful Fools blog. You really should read the whole thing, but the relevant points are:
I asked John Moore, the author of the Useful Fools post, to give us links to the studies or data that he used, but he replied that he had gathered the numbers from a Interpol and FBI stats without keeping the links. Tsk, tsk, John! I had hoped to track down the data myself, but have been unable to do so, and am unlikely to get a chance anytime soon. The data is consistent with a number of other items that I have read over the years, so I think its legit, but caveat blogster. The data can be read to support any number of things, as I am sure the comment mob will demonstrate soon. I tend to look at it as consistent with my preconceptions (yet another reason why I think that the data is probably good – it makes me look smart!). First and foremost, though, I think it refutes the notion that “cowboy” America is a violent and dangerous place. It is also consistent with the view that, in America at least, more gun control equals more crime, as the high crime areas (large urban centers) labor for the most part under the very restrictive gun controls (and have for decades). In short, it is safer to be free and self-reliant (that is, armed) than to trust the state to provide safety and security from crime.  August 15th, 2003 | 68 comments - (Comments are closed)
Frank J. at IMHO has come up with the perfect way to fish for links (well, I fell for it at least)… he has declared war on the mighty Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit . And what is our view on this revolt against The InstaPowers That Be? We are one of Glenn’s blog children… fie on that false prophet Frank J. and all hail to Glenn Reynolds, the Dark Lord of the net, the Ayatollah of Rock and Rollah, the Balrog of the Blogosphere! 
Behold the fate of those who defy the InstaPowers That Be August 15th, 2003 | 44 comments - (Comments are closed)
Those liberty-loving cyber-guerillas over at Bureaucrash have cooked up a wry little animation the subject of which is a Canadian (I presume) politician caught red-handed (and gold-wristed) in the act of selling snake-oil. Well worth a look. [My thanks to reader Ernest Young for the link.] August 15th, 2003 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
Sir Ernest Benn’s The State The Enemy was first published in 1953, in other words exactly half a century ago. Chapter 1, also entitled “The State The Enemy” begins with a justification for this title:
But Benn was aware that this word “State” might suggest different things, and different emotions to potential American readers. So he concluded his first chapter thus:
For some Americans, in other words, the “State” is a friend. But such Americans shouldn’t be put off from reading The State The Enemy. And the same applies to reading Samizdata, no matter what they may sometimes read here. August 15th, 2003 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
A cascade of power blackouts have hit the north eastern USA and parts of Canada, causing widespread chaos. It was also reported that due to the power cuts, the United Nations building in New York City has been closed. So, not entirely bad news then.  August 14th, 2003 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
I’ve just done a posting here using this BBC report, about the Prince William 21st Birthday break-in at Windsor Castle, concerning the matter of who is supposed to watch all the surveillance cameras that the world is now being flooded with. But another point about that report struck me as also worth commenting on, and in a separate posting. One thing at a time, and all that. Here’s the bit that particularly caught my attention, concerning the report on the incident that has just been published:
Now is it just me, or is this not a rather odd thing to recommend? Surely the problem that this “comedian” posed to police that night was not that they didn’t have the law on their side to enable them to stop something bad. It was simply that they didn’t do the job that the law already gave them ample entitlement to do. It’s extremely common among silly people who know no better, such as voters and politicians, to want to solve every problem that ever happens by suggesting a new law to stop it. I once took part in a vox-pop studio debate of the sort one agrees to be on but would never dream of watching, in which one of my fellow debaters on the subject of bank robbery came within about a quarter of a second of saying, on national television, that there ought to be a law against it. Okay, from the mere public you can maybe expect no better. But when a senior police officer, invited to comment on a security cock-up and suggest lessons to be learned, also reaches for the law, we really are in trouble, it seems to me. It may be that in this particular case, there really is good reason to think that a “new offence” should indeed be created. But me, I choose to doubt it. So what? A policeman thinks a new crime should be invented. Why does that matter? It matters because there is already a Himalayan mountain range of legislation, with tons more pouring forth from Parliaments everywhere, every day, week, month, year. And a world in which there is so much law that nobody – not even lawyers, let alone policemen, politicians, and certainly not the general public – can possibly be aware of what it all consists of is not a good world to live in. It actually has quite a lot in common with a world with no law at all. I don’t know when it happened, but some years ago I came to two conclusions about my own personal law-abidingness. (1) At any particular moment I am probably always breaking some damn law or other. (2) To hell with it. I still try to be good. But I have given up trying to obey the law. The trouble starts for me if the powers-that-be, or more likely a power-that-is decide(s) that they (it) want(s) to get me. Suppose I surprise all of us and say something here which really angers the government, or, more likely, some particular powerful individual towards the top end of it. In a world of infinite law, this person can be absolutely confident that a search for a law that I am breaking will turn up something, and maybe a great deal. He may never take it as far as me having to talk my way out of it in a court of law, but he may be able to make a deal of trouble for me nevertheless, just by going through the legal motions and stopping them just before they go public, but not letting me know about that until the last minute. Remember all those poets and academics who used to annoy the government of the old USSR? What did the government of the USSR do to them? Did it complain about their poems, or have complicated arguments with them about the nuances of how to interpret the Soviet “Constitution”? Did it hell? It just found some law that the poor wretch had been breaking (because everyone broke the law in the old USSR – just to stay alive) and set the legal wheels in motion. I mean, we can’t have currency smuggling, now can we? Course not. That’s the world we may find ourselves in quite soon, and I dare say that the experience of not a few persons is that we are already there. It may seem a long argument from a policeman trying to avoid blaming idiot fellow policemen for some policing fiasco and instead blaming the law, to Soviet dissidents, but I hope I have explained that there is a genuine connection here. Discuss. August 14th, 2003 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
The case of the comedian who strolled into Prince William’s 21st birthday party on June 21 illustrates the point that surveillance cameras are only as much use as the people supposedly manning them and paying attention to them. That night, the members of the Metropolitan Police and of the various Royal Security organisations who were supposed to be doing this weren’t. Had our joker been a real suicide bomber he might have landed us all with King Edward, so I heard on the TV today. The thing is, criminals of the more usual in-out don’t-make-a-fuss sort have already worked out that merely being photographed doesn’t matter if no one is paying attention to the photographs until they’ve done their criminal deeds. I believe that the spread of surveillance cameras means that there will soon be a whole new class of people in the world, the surveillers. We will become aware of these people rather as we recently became aware of call centre operatives, for there will have to be a lot of them to keep up with the flow of pictures. One thing’s for sure. They’ll know a lot more stuff than they’ll officially be allowed to tell, and there’ll be lots of arguments about what their rights and responsibilities will be, and who they will have to report to. I suppose it is possible that “expert” computer programmes will enable CCTV security to be entirely automated, to the point where robots will spot trouble and act against it, but it seems unlikely. Too much to go wrong, I would have thought. (Comments on the immediate likelihood, say in the next two decades, of such expert systems would be most welcome.) I wonder, will the day ever come when a human can be arrested and charged by a robot? Maybe not. But computers will have work to do in observing what they think might be unusual or anomalous events, which require serious human attention. An extra dimension of interesting could be added to such matters by the fact that, what with modern communications racing ahead the way they are, the people looking at the pictures (assuming computers don’t muscle in on this job) won’t even have to be in the same countries as the cameras, any more than call centre people have to be now. People who became skilled in the art of watching television (I reckon I’m pretty good at this myself) could win national awards for export achievement. The Baby Boom is getting old, and is going to be very hard to keep in nice fat juicy pensions like they (we) are now expecting, and they (we) will have a lot of votes. We will, I anticipate, be demanding undemanding jobs to top up our pensions. Snooping on other people with CCTV cameras would be just the thing. The 21st century equivalent of peeking at the passing scene through net curtains. Not a very pretty picture. Not a definitely nice world. Please understand that I am describing the way I think things are heading, not recommending it or approving of it. August 14th, 2003 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
The Financial Times in an editorial chastises the U.S. Federal Reserve bank chairman Alan Greenspan for encouraging speculators, such as those mysterious bodies called hedge funds, to snaffle up bonds recently by cutting interest rates to ward off deflation, only to find that bond prices dropped sharply once it appeared the economic situation in the U.S. was improving. (It is too early to say for sure that things are getting better in the world economy though. Certainly not in Continental Europe). I do not really have a quick way of picking through the rights and wrongs of the FT’s position. I think it is plainly daft that Greenspan, who remains one of the sharpest economic brains around, would have deliberately set out to con investors. What I do think this episode does, however, is reinforce in my mind the enormous risks of entrusting great economic powers to folk like Dr. Greenspan. In fact, the more highly regarded such men and women are, the more lethal the consequences when they slip up. Even many folk who consider themselves to be ardent free marketeers can get caught up in near religious reverence for the great central banker. Financial speculators hang on every word. The most bland of statements are parsed for some deeper meaning. I have spent too many hours than I care to remember trying to work out if the statement of X or Y actually suggests that inflation is likely to up, down, or whatever. The cult of the central banker is one of those belief systems of surprisingly short duration, by historical standards. Maybe in decades to come, we will look back on the era of Alan Greenspan and his ilk rather as we would that of the Medieval Popes. And we will be even more struck when we recall that Greenspan, when a young economics student and friend of Ayn Rand, urged a return to old-style private banking and the unfairly maligned Gold Standard. August 14th, 2003 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
As I walked along Sumatra Road yesterday in the early evening, a burglar alarm rang out in a house about ten along from where I’m moving out of. Out of twenty houses along that stretch of the road, there have been half a dozen burglaries in the last two months (including my Moslem neighbours who were robbed whilst they were at evening prayers in the mosque in late June, and myself two weeks ago). The modus operandi is identical and no fingerprints are ever found, suggesting that either the burglar is a police informant (so they don’t want to catch him because British police are not allowed to employ an informant with a criminal record), or he wears gloves and has some skill. The ‘local’ police based three miles away admit that they are surprised at the recent crime spree in the neighbourhood: burglaries may have trebled in the area this year. Today, having dialled 999 and explained that there had been a number of burglaries in the area I gave my name and address and assumed that a normal response would occur: either nothing or at least 20 minutes response time. I cannot honestly say that the service was worse than I expected. When I called back I was told that the control centre would not send anyone unless there was evidence that someone was actually inside the property. I asked if this happened frequently and was told that 95% of alarm call-outs were a waste of time. If this is so, I’m surprised that burglar alarms are even allowed in this country. So the solution is obvious: if a neighbour is burgled, call the police saying that you’ve shot a burglar, give the address you think the burglary is in progress, then drink a couple of glasses of whiskey, before the cops arrive to either protect their informant or crush an attempted self-defence, so you can claim to have been confused. Do NOT try to get in a car. You don’t want to risk losing your driving license. As for being burgled myself, does anyone know a pig-farmer? August 14th, 2003 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
This afternoon I stopped off at my local branch of the Sainsbury’s supermarket chain to get something for dinner. I picked up a prepared ham and mushroom tagliatelle to heat up in the microwave when I got home. However, I like a lot of cheese on my pasta, so I headed off the the cheese section looking for some parmesan. I walked past all the cheeses in the store, and couldn’t see it. I then walked past all the cheeses again, and still couldn’t see it. On the third pass, I saw a sign on the shelf which said
(I didn’t have a digital camera with me to photograph the sign, and of course I wouldn’t dream of stealing a sign off the shelf of a privately owned shop, particularly when it is doing something useful like helping people find their correct cheese). Yes, it is the type of EU law Gabriel Syme was talking about recently, in which the EU has been drawing up lists of geographical (and other) names used for food products, and has been insisting that the names be used only on food produced in that exact place. Cheese that does not come from the Parma area can no longer be called parmesan. Now, this is problematic, because as I use the word, “parmesan” is a name for a particular type of strong flavoured hard cheese. Yes, it is named after Parma where a lot of such cheese is made, but I personally have no expectation that something called “parmesan” does actually come from there. I do expect that it will be hard, will have a particular flavour, and that it will taste good on my pasta. (If a cheese does come from Parma and does not satisfy these requirements, then I do not think it should be called “parmesan”). I have no difficulty with a law that requires it to be clear on the packaging whether a “parmesan” cheese comes from Parma or not. There is already another more specific name for cheeses that do, which is “Parmigiano-Reggiano”, and I have little problem with this name being restricted to cheeses from Parma, because it has never become generic. Really, though, if the word has become so generic that there is no intent to deceive about the origins of the cheese, then banning all use of the word otherwise is going too far. I think that geographical names are like any other trademarks. If they are not defended, they can be lost. And if they are lost, they cannot be retrieved. And this present EU policy overreaches badly. → Continue reading: Who renamed my cheese? August 13th, 2003 | 59 comments - (Comments are closed)
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