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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FT.com reports that the UK government’s proposal to genetically screen all newborn babies and store the information in a database is likely to be rejected by the Human Genetics Commission, the watchdog set up by Labour in 1999 to monitor advances in biotechnology, on the grounds of being unworkable, expensive and potentially threatening to civil liberties.
Baroness Helena Kennedy QC, the head of the HGC, said the medical benefits of the Human Genome had been over-hyped, leading to unrealistic expectations and the threat of discrimination against people who carried certain genes.
It is one of those things that initially has great attraction: The idea that you might be able, at the begining of your life, to know so much about yourself that you can pretty much chart your life appropriately, make sure that you have twice the normal helping of spinach and therefore throw off the chance of getting a disease. But it does not take account of where a child might be living, what it might be susceptible to because of its environment, and all the other factors that interact with your genes and change the prognosis.
The proposal to test all babies was announced in a White Paper published in June. It promised £50m ($80.4m) to expand the ability of the National Health Service to cope with the rapid advance in genetic testing.
I found this on Gay.com UK, so the language may be a bit distorted (e.g the phrase ‘the Pope’s anti-gay document…) but still worth a post:
The Irish Council for Civil Liberties says it will prosecute any priests found distributing or quoting the Pope’s anti-gay document for hate crimes.
Any clergy found handling the 12-page document, released last week as a statement of the Catholic Church’s response to gay marriages, will face charges under the country’s hatred legislation reports suggest.
Although the document itself is not illegal, it could lead to an increase in hatred, the Council said, and by stirring up hatred in the parish, the clergy could face jail terms of six months.
According to their website the Irish Council for Civil Liberties is an independent governmental organisation promoting and defending human rights and civil liberties.
Update: Here is the same news from Irish Times quoting Ms Aisling Reidy, director of the ICCL:
The document itself may not violate the Act, but if you were to use the document to say that gays are evil, it is likely to give rise to hatred, which is against the Act. The wording is very strong and certainly goes against the spirit of the legislation.
Andy Duncan, in his rather, umm, shall we say, idiosyncratic post Ode to the future, made a very good point. He noted that we tend to obsess over the bad news here at Samizdata.
As a political professional, I can assure you that nothing turns off your audience more quickly than an unremitting diet of negativity, and nothing harms an advocate more than having only complaints without solutions. I happen to believe that, in the very big picture and the very long view, a lot of trends are running our way. Now, I enjoy complaining about the cult of the state as much as the next fellow, but I will be making a conscious effort to bring some good news to the fore. With that in mind, I give you the retirement of Senator Fritz Hollings.
This is good news, in small part, because it his seat in the US Senate will likely go from the Democratic Party to the Republican next year. As odious as the Republicans frequently are, I find that I can tolerate around 15% of their platform, as opposed to perhaps 2% of the Democratic platform, so this counts as a small plus.
The major reason that this is good news is that ol’ Fritz was perhaps the single most committed protectionist in the Senate.
“Later, in a telephone interview, Hollings said he plans to redouble his efforts before his term ends on issues ranging from budget discipline to protecting textile and other domestic industries, which were among his leading interests for years.”
He recently became known as the ‘Senator from Disney,’ after campaign contributions from that source revealed a previously unsuspected interest in extending intellectual property protections to unprecedented lengths, allowing Disney to retain income streams from Mickey Mouse far into the future.
(For the uninitiated, when a Democrat talks about “budget discipline,” they are referring to increased taxes, not reduced spending.)
More than 10,000 people, falsely declared dead in northern India by greedy relatives and corrupt officials in order to steal their land, are trying desperately to prove that they are really alive.
Fifty of the ‘dead’ staged a protest last week by shaving their heads in front of the state assembly building in Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh state. Lal Bihari Mritak, secretary of a pressure group, the Association of the Dead said:
The state refuses to accept that they are alive. If it did, it would mean altering the district revenue records and restoring to them their properties, which is something that dishonest officials oppose.
Mata Prasad, a petitioner explains how court cases can get bogged down for years in the over-burdened and corrupt judiciary.
I haven’t had a hearing of my case simply because I can’t afford to pay a bribe. My documents disappeared from court overnight and I now have to start from the beginning.
Lal Bihari fought for eight years to be declared alive again, and a Bombay producer now plans to make a film about his struggle.
I finally won the battle and was brought back to life in the revenue records.
It seems that the Indian state has achieved nirvana all states aspire to – the ability to literally decide about the life and death of their citizens.
Whilst Tony Martin’s case continues to ignite a spark of common sense in the public as well as forcing Blunkett in the face of public outrage to promise new laws to protect the rights of householders, people in the rest of the world (i.e. in the US) continue to defend their own…
The last time police came by his Tripe Street home to investigate complaints about drug dealing in the West Ashley neighborhood, William Gates [ed. no relation!] made it clear to them that he had had enough.
“I told the police, ‘Bring the coroner and body bags the next time you come out here,’ ” he said. “Nobody is going to run me out of my home.”
Last Friday morning Gates made good on his statement as he shot a man in his front yard.
Roused from his sleep by the sound of gunfire about 4:30 a.m. Friday, the 67-year-old Gates took up his 12-gauge Browning automatic shotgun, stepped out onto his front porch and fired three blasts at men he said were drug dealers having a shootout in his front yard.
He only wounded the men he shot. But it wasn’t for lack of trying. “I shot to kill,” he said. “I’m not going to lie to you.”
The attitude of the local police was rather different from the one taken by ‘best police in the world’ towards Tony Martin. While they did not publicly approve of what Gates did, they filed no charges against him. Charleston Police Chief Reuben Greenberg explains:
We have no plans to arrest him. We can’t see from where we sit where a crime’s been committed. People have the right to provide for their safety, and we believe that is what he was doing.
Are you listening, Mr Blunkett?
Mr Gates vows that he will be ready if friends of the three men try to retaliate, and he smiled as he said he planned to acquire a gun to protect himself.
They better make sure they get me if they come back, because if they don’t get me, I’m going to kill all of them.
That’s the spirit. And I bet that the ‘friends’ of the drug dealers will think twice about stepping into Mr Gates front yard. Think of all the taxpayer money saved by not having to ‘protect’ the harassed homeowner. (In the case of Mr Martin, a team of Norfolk police officers had to install security and surveillance devices inside and outside of Martin’s farmhouse and prior to his release Scotland Yard’s considered placing him under the witness protection scheme. The cost of giving Martin a new identity was indicated as £500,000, which would be paid by the taxpayer.)
Although the final decision whether to charge Mr Gates will be made by the solicitor’s office early this week, something tells me that his story will have a radically different ending to that of the unfortunate Tony Martin…
In an extraordinary confession, and despite earlier strong denials, Downing Street has admitted that the Prime Minister’s personal spokesman, Tom Kelly, had spun a story to several newspapers that Dr David Kelly, the UK government’s senior Iraq weapons inspector, was a ‘Walter Mitty’ fantasist. Dr David Kelly’s funeral is due to be held tomorrow.
Sorry Tom, when I first caught this story I totally misheard it. I thought when I heard the words ‘Walter Mitty’ and ‘Downing Street’, together, it could only be one person you were talking about. You know, that blokey bloke, the one with the hair and the smile, the one who fantasises about taking over the world, the one who tells the world of his standing on the terraces at the Gallowgate End, his stowing away to the Caribbean, and a host of other fibs to try to make us like him more. Not to mention the never-ending lies and spin from his corrupt government power-grab machine, which started off with the Bernie Ecclestone saga, worked through to the undisputed NHS achievements, and went gone on to include the threat of weapons of mass destruction, in Iraq, all primed and ready to go off in a measly forty-five minutes. Plus, of course, we won’t even mention the endless slippery associations with other puff serial merchants like Peter Mandelson, Stephen Byers, and the lugubrious Peter Foster.
And I promise to forget the biggest planned lie of all, the one where Alastair Campbell leaves the government, to miraculously clear out the Augean stables of New Labour mendacity, which then presents us with a fresh new Mr Blair, a cleaned-up Mr Blair, and an un-spun Mr Blair, representing all that is Herculean and noble about the way, the light, and the truth of your fabulous and continuing reign of New Labour glory.
Yes, I promise to forget all of the above, because I got it wrong. You weren’t speaking about the Dear Leader at all. What you were attempting to do was to deliberately destroy the name and reputation of a dead man who (probably) killed himself because you, or Tony, or Geoff, or Alastair, or all of you in Downing Street, hung him out to dry and let him twist in the wind, because he may have revealed one of the many Big Lies at the heart of your Big Lie government. Let me remind you of something Adolf Hitler once said:
The great masses of the people will more easily fall victims to a great lie than to a small one
You may have got away with the forty-five minutes lie, because it was such a Hitlerian whopper. But now you’ve been rumbled on the little lies, like the Walter Mitty one about Dr Kelly, it really is all over, bar the denials, for all of you there in Downing Street. Because nobody will believe any of the big ones any more. What’s really funny, however, is that the sun-blessed one really is in the Caribbean, for once, though this time one presumes he didn’t need to go as a stowaway. You should’ve listened to Adolf.
Aaron Barschak, the loon who thought it was amusing to dress up as bin Laden and gatecrash a fancy dress party hosted by the Royals, has not been able to draw in the crowds at the Edinburgh arts festival this year, according to this report.
The gag is definitely on him. Here’s hoping he crawls under a rock where he came from. Sorry to be killjoy, but dressing up as terrorist is not my idea of a joke.
David Bernstein, posting on the Volokh Conspiracy, notes that:
The political views of Latinos are troubling for advocates of limited government, who also tend to be advocates of liberal immigration policies. As the New York Times reported yesterday, and has been well-known for some time by those who follow such things, Latinos, like prior waves of immigrants from poor Catholic countries, tend to be socially conservative and in favor of big government in the economic realm. In the famous Nolan Chart, Latino voters are disproportionately in the “authoritarian” quadrant, the opposite quadrant from limited government-oriented libertarians.
Given that Latinos are already considered a very important swing vote, and will become ever more important as they become a larger percentage of voters, the current volume of Latino immigration can’t be good news in the short to medium term for fans of limited government.
This is depressing news, given that Latinos are such a large and rapidly growing ethnic group in the US, and have been identified by both parties as a critical consituency to court. Identifying Latinos are social conservatives likely to, say, oppose gay marriage could go a long way toward explaining the apparent ease with which leading Democrats and Republicans have come out in opposition to the idea. The pursuit of the Latino vote, while it may lead to pandering/sensitivity (take your pick) on immigration issues that is congenial to at least some libertarians, may also lead both parties further into the swamps of government-enforced morality.
One wonders if there are any ethnic groups that are culturally predisposed to liberty. One also wonders whether the fabled ‘self-selection’ of the immigration ordeal skews the immigrant profile toward those who want more freedom than they have at home, or toward those who are inured to enduring the immigration and naturalization bureaucracy.
Just following up on what I was saying this morning on the dangers of anti-terrorism laws being applied to situations that do not involve terrorism, Eugene Volokh provides an example of the way in which too broadly worded anti-terrorism laws can be misused. A prosecuter in North Carolina has charged someone who has been manufacturing methamphetamine with two counts of “manufacturing a nuclear or chemical weapon”, because the definition of chemical weapons under the law is
any substance that is designed or has the capability to cause death or serious injury and . . . is or contains toxic or poisonous chemicals or their immediate precursors
and methamphetamines can clearly be described that way. Because the accused is being prosecuted under the anti-terrorism law, the penalties are harsher (and he may have less legal protection – I am not sure of the details of that particular law) than he would have if he were charged with a normal drugs offence.
I suppose we can observe that this is another example of the general way in which people’s rights and liberties tend to get brushed aside as part of the war on drugs, too.
In a move which will be the effective creation of a state ID card, Dr Liam Fox, the Conservative health spokesman, has said the next Conservative government will introduce a health entitlement card for all UK citizens.
Thanks, Liam. It’s just what I’ve always wanted.
These cards will either be difficult-to-forge, requiring a trip to a police station to get your iris scanned, or they will be easy to forge, requiring a used tenner in the heroin-dealing under-the-table pub of your choice, to get hold of an effective fake one.
And given that the black market works free of most government interference, except for the bribes necessary to pay off police enforcers, expect even hard-to-forge ID cards to come on the black market for under a tenner within a couple of years.
So in order to garner a few short-term votes, Dr Liam Fox is willing to foist a new hideous layer of expensive bureaucratic control upon us, which will be easily circumvented by everyone except by the guiltless and the honest. Though I’m sure that when it is, an even more expensive and intrusive ID card system will be the solution proposed by the next Conservative government, once again to ‘protect’ the blessed NHS.
Don’t prevaricate, Liam. Just abolish the NHS, and have done with this Jurassic-Age monster.
Though I think I’m rapidly approaching the Carrite position, where just like the pigs in ‘Animal Farm’, the difference between New Labour and the Conservatives is becoming ever more difficult to discern.
Until even recently I held great hope for the Conservative party, but over these continuing issues of ID cards I am losing my belief.
I blame that Murray Rothbard. His books are just too enlightening.
Not that there is any Deep Libertarian Significance to this story, but no opportunity should be missed to revel in the humiliation of a bureaucrat.
Superintendent of Schools Wilfredo T. Laboy, who recently put two dozen teachers on unpaid leave for failing a basic English proficiency test, has himself flunked a required literacy test three times, The Eagle-Tribune reported Sunday.
. . .
Laboy, who receives a 3 percent pay hike this month that will raise his salary to $156,560, recently put 24 teachers on unpaid administrative leave because they failed a basic English test, which has been required since voters passed a law last fall requiring English-only classrooms.
[State Education Commissioner David P.] Driscoll said he is willing to give Laboy more time to prepare for another retest.
”He’s not a native language speaker, so a formal test is something he needs to prepare for,” Driscoll said. ”It doesn’t mean anything now. It will mean more as time goes on because there’s an expectation that he’ll pass.’
I suspect the really scary part of this is that the Lawrence school district had 24 teachers who lack basic English proficiency. The other scary part is that the failure on multiple occasions to demonstrate basic language skills “doesn’t mean anything” if the individual in question is already enfolded in the forgiving arms of the civil service.
Someone has recently set up a syndicated account for Samizdata.net over on LiveJournal… if XML feeds are something you are interested in, check it out!
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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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