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David Farrer comments here on the case of a someone who may be sent to jail for using a mobile telephone to record and transmit proceedings in the Perth Sheriff Court. Apparently they don’t like it so much when we use technology to keep tabs on them. August 4th, 2003 | Comments are closed
 If anyone doubted that the libertarian ‘vibe’ is seen by many as powerful and attractive, then the fact so many people who represent its antithesis keep trying to hijack the term to mean ‘someone opposed to liberty’ should make it clear that the word ‘libertarian’ is hot, hot, hot (i.e. much as the term ‘liberal’ within the Anglosphere was hijacked when it was hot and which has now come to mean ‘illiberal’, which is to say, socialist). I have argued before that Libertarian Socialism is an oxymoron… well the same applies to Libertarian National Socialism. But then given that National Socialism and Socialism are just tactical variants within the same old statist collectivist class of political philosophy, it is hardly surprising the arguments as to why one is absurd to call itself libertarian applies equally well to the other. The only real difference is that the Nazi variety of socialist collectivists just have better tailors and a worse press. The use of the term by overt Nazis is really no more bizarre than its use by Noam Chomsky, that socialist apologist for Pol Pot and several other of the world’s collectivist mass murderers. August 4th, 2003 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
This story in today’s New York Times is fascinating:
Which, to cut a long story and Alex Malo’s small intestine short, caused big problems. If your intestine is too short, you can’t eat. But Dr Kim had already been thinking about this. Here’s his idea:
This had to be tested on animals first, and “a million forms” had to be signed saying yes, it could kill Alex but please do it anyway. They did. It worked. Read the whole thing. There are many lessons to be learned from this story. I suggest four: One: the New York Times still has its uses. Two: testing on animals has its uses. Three: people with names like “Kim” are making a huge contribution to life in America. Four: you need the right institutional setting to do clever things.
Entrepreneurship is just as much a medical thing as a more conventionally “business” thing, or, to put it another way, running medicine rather like a business, as the USA is famous for doing, can also do a lot of good. I don’t know the details of how well or badly Britain’s National Health Service works in circumstances like these, but I doubt it would have been such a good environment for Dr Kim, or for Alex Malo. August 4th, 2003 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
Instapundit links to this story, and quotes a fellow lawyer who alerted him to it that it shows you shouldn’t automatically disbelieve a client who says he doesn’t know how some porn found its way onto his hard drive.
In a world where simply being charged with a crime causes millions to presume some degree of guilt, and gives personal enemies their chance straight away to move in for the kill by making use of other bits of the legal system, then the decision merely to prosecute becomes a sentence in its own right. August 4th, 2003 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
Virginia Postrel has a small piece on her blog about the civil liberties implications of the war on terror. (She also links to this Reason article by Jacob Sullum). Essentially her point is that if you give the authorities arbitrary and unaccountable powers of arrest (or to violate civil liberties in other ways) in order to fight terrorism, then eventually these powers are going to be used on other people as well, particularly the opponents of whoever is in power. Therefore, accountability and openness is crucial. August 4th, 2003 | Comments are closed
A ‘legal opinion’ about the incident that made our Jonathan Pearce “mighty queasy”.
Via Instapundit August 4th, 2003 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
We all know the old saying: there’s lies, then there’s damnable lies and and there’s government education statistics:
Methinks that Mr.Little is being polite. I suspect that what he really wants to say is that an exam system that is so ‘dumbed-down’ as to ensure that virtually nobody fails is about as much practical use as a chocolate teapot. Handing every schoolchild lots of certificates to wave around doesn’t mean that they have actually been educated.
And they are right not to have any faith because the government is not concerned about education it is merely anxious to present lots of impressive statistics in order to convince everyone (including themselves) that children are being educated instead of merely processed. This isn’t education it’s a puppet show. However, it is difficult to hide the sordid truth from the people whose business it is to actually help young people learn lots of things and it is gratifying to witness some of them breaking rank. Hopefully this is the start of a trend as people who truly value education begin to realise that it is far too important and precious to be left to the government. August 4th, 2003 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
Perhaps I should be more disturbed than I am by the possibility that our Prime Minister appears to have been beset by holy visions:
Once again, life imitates art with Mr.Blair appearing to have lived up the Private Eye magazine caricature of him as a trendy, preachy Vicar. All chortling aside (to be stored up and deployed at a later date) I have no way of proving that this isn’t strictly a matter of conscience. I can’t prove it isn’t, but I simply don’t buy it. The timing is far too suspicious. For me it has got all the hallmarks of a frantic search for a new moral underpinning by a politician whose quasi-evangelical ‘government for everyone’ zeal first had the sheen rubbed off of it and then had the shit kicked out of it. This is not so much an act of piety as an act of desperation. But perhaps I am being more cynical than I need to be. They say you should never judge a man until you walked a mile in his shoes. Right now, I wouldn’t want to be in Mr.Blair’s shoes. His personal popularity is plummeting and the government he is supposed to be steering just cannot seem to do anything right anymore. Every which way he turns he sees enemies, backstabbers, plotters and sneering journalists asking questions he just cannot answer. Faced with that vista who wouldn’t want to retreat to the comforting certainties of that old-time religion? I know I am not the first to say so but it does look increasingly likely that Mr.Blair is groping for the door marked ‘exit’. August 4th, 2003 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
From the Telegraph yesterday:
This last is to counter the fear among the teachers that the cameras will also be used to spy on them.
Not for the first time, my reaction to being told the cost of some surveillance kit is: that’s cheap. Soon, if they want it to be everywhere, and they do, it will be. August 4th, 2003 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
Here’s a quick quiz for you… I’ll post the answers later on. 1) Whose idea was the Department of Homeland Security? 2) Who suggested the US use pre-emptive action against States harbouring WMD? Answer: Well, one person got very close, Gary Hart was indeed involved with both of these. These two items and a whole bunch of others are part of the final report “Road Map For National Security: Imperative For Change, PhaseIII”. This was a bipartisan two year commission which completed its’ draft final report (from which I am working) Jan 31, 2001. President Bush and his team had barely moved into their offices at the time. The commission was co-chaired by Hart and Rudman and was tasked with a total systemic review of US National Security. August 4th, 2003 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
Supermarkets have begun trials on coordinating RFID tags and security cameras in order to reduce theft as the first step in converging logistical and surveillance technologies. The first step has already been taken through trials at a supermarket in Cambridge, where RFID tags were used to identify a purchaser through a security camera. In this particular case, a second camera at the checkout was used to ensure that the item was purchased legally. The technology is also utilised on the London Tube.
The article produced a link to one of the lesser known groups within civil liberties and demonstrates the diversity of organisation that these concerns attracts. The campaign, known as Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy and Invasion and Numbering, or CASPIAN, is opposed to loyalty cards as those who opt out of obtaining a card tend to pay higher prices as the cost of preserving their privacy. They also provide the answer for that burning question…With all the pain and suffering in the world and people starving in [fill in location here], how can you justify spending your time on supermarket club cards? The answer includes: My passion happens to be preserving personal freedom, staving off totalitarianism, and resisting Orwellian intrusions. Sentiments we can all agree with. August 3rd, 2003 | Comments are closed
People like David Attenborough or almost anyone connected with Population Connection (a group which used to be rather more directly called ‘Zero Population Growth’), are technocrats at heart. Problems are identified, analyzed by experts and their solutions to those problems are imposed via political interaction. It is simply ‘rule by expert’ and there is quite literally no limit to the areas of life which is beyond the overarching gaze of the men and woman with letters after their names. When such people are given access to political power, no limits to what they can make you do or not do. The experts are, after all, the best and thus know best, and if people will not be swayed by their words spoken from the position of superior knowledge, then they must be forced to comply via the political system. They are the new would-be aristocracy in the literal Greek sense of the word. In today’s Times of London (we do not link directly to The Times), David Attenborough, speaking for the Optimum Population Trust, demanded that the British state work to halve Britain’s population by establishing a ‘population policy’.
Indira Gandhi and Deng Xiaoping shared such views and enacted policies based on the realization that gentle prods will not stop people having children. Their views were based on crude pragmatism married with an honest understanding of the efficacy of coercive violence. People like David Attenborough however take a rather more lyrical utopian view of nature and ‘sustainable economics’ (which in fact has nothing whatsoever to do with economics) and thus are rather more grandiose in their objectives. They seek to limit people’s right to have children or to travel the world or engage in ‘wasteful’ or ‘harmful’ economic activity generally that is not approved of by…well, them, of course. They wish to restore balance and harmony. This sort of idealized view of nature and man’s place in it (or lack thereof) was something that would have gained approving nods not just from idyllic ruralist 18th and 19th century poets but also Heinrich Himmler. For these people there are no ‘market’ solutions caused by the social interaction of free people, because that would allow the possibility that free people may simply ignore the ‘wise words’ of The Best. In a political system, rather than a social system, there are only a few people who must be convinced and manipulated, and thus it through coercive collectivist politics that the new technocratic aristocracy seek to apply their ‘wisdom’. At least the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement are not trying to use the violence of state to make people comply. The same cannot be said of Sir David Attenborough and his collectivist ilk. August 3rd, 2003 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
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