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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Since postings here today seem a bit thin on the ground, let me recycle a link which I’ve already featured on my Culture Blog, but which I think is interesting enough to make a posting for the mass media. (I originally found it at b3ta.com.)
I’m talking about this, this being a site which includes something I’ve read about a lot but never actually seen demonstrated with the relevant contrasts. I’m talking about the ancient and now technologically rejuvenated art of picture retouching.
The most striking is the picture you get to straight from the link, but there are lots of others at the same site.
Okay I admit it, at this point I did pause a bit to think of a political moral to stick at the end, a thing not needed on a Culture Blog. But I think there is one, concerning the degree to which cameras do or do not tell lies. Put it this way, I think maybe I’ll give this site a mention at White Rose as well. An awful lot of credence is placed these days on photographic evidence. What this before/after site reminds us is that photos are only as reliable as a way to tell the truth as are the people in charge of them. (You have only to think of Stalin’s graphics department.) As it gets easier to manipulate images, so our readiness to trust them ought to diminish.
This site shows what is the result of retouching. But does anyone here know how long it takes to do this kind of thing, and how difficult it is? And can all of it simply be done with Photoshop?
This afternoon my fellow Samizdata-scribe David Carr took me to watch his beloved Chelsea play Leicester City at football, at Chelsea Football Club’s home ground, Stamford Bridge, which is a walk away from the Samizdata HQ. He had a spare ticket, caused by the temporary absence in the USA of his usual Chelsea companion.
It was quite a day, if only because it was the first Chelsea home game of the season, and accordingly the first home game attended by Chelsea’s new owner Roman Abramovich, the mysterious and infinitely rich young Russian who has been spending money like water on new players. £50 million is quite a lot to you and me, but to him it is apparently small change. Who knows how he made his money? Certainly no one in the crowd today gave a damn. It was enough that he was spending a little of it on their team. Abramovich got the biggest cheer of the entire day. It occurs to me that owning football clubs have now replaced owning national newspapers as the preferred hobby of the Infinitely Rich.
The Chelsea supporters by whom David and I were surrounded took the whole thing desperately seriously. They showed most excitement (a), as you would expect, when the two Chelsea goals were scored, and (b) when the referee ever made a decision of which they disapproved, i.e. not in favour of Chelsea. It seemed to me that for these person, football had completely replaced politics as the focus of their ‘political’ enthusiasms, if you get my meaning. Which might have something to do with why the Super-Rich have switched from owning newspapers to owning football clubs. Both are the result of their fantasies of political power. No politician (or for that matter newspaper tycoon) would ever get a cheer nowadays like the one that greeted Abramovich today. → Continue reading: Chelsea 2 Leicester City 1 – thoughts on why football is so popular
The State of California has, I’d guess almost unnoticed, passed new financial privacy laws that require banks and other financial service providers to obtain their customer’s consent before passing or selling on their client’s financial details.
It shows that it is still possible to get legislators to pay attention to privacy issues, but, as this interview with the new law’s proposer, State Senator Jackie Speier reveals, you do have to be persistent.
Still, it’s good to see hard work paying off.
Have you had a bad day? Got a problem? Is your life a mess? Are you sick? Lame? Poor? Lonely? Unemployed? Or are you just fed up, listless and overwhelmed with feelings of exhaustion and hopelessness?
Well, you can always vent your frustrations by blaming your troubles on George W. Bush. Why not? Everyone else does. For everything. From perished pensioners in Paris to stubbed toes in Sarajevo to nosebleeds in Nairobi there is not a misfortune or a twist of cruel fate anywhere on the face of this planet that cannot be laid squarely at the varnished door of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
And this is all because that current occupant of the most important office in that august building went and ‘tore up the Kyoto Treaty’; the modern equivalent of snapping a ju-ju stick. Thus has Mr.Bush incurred the wrath of the angry spirits.
Of course, George Bush did not ‘tear up’ the Kyoto Treaty at all (which is a shame because it deserves to be torn up). But that doesn’t matter. We’re not dealing in truth here, we’re delving the murky, opaque depths of mythology and superstition. George Bush is for the modern left/green axis what the devil was for medieval peasants.
Perhaps Mr.Bush (or his advisers at any rate) is aware of this and decided to take advantage of the situation. After all, if you’ve been cast as the devil, you may as well go ahead and live up to the role:
The Bush administration plans to open a huge loophole in America’s air pollution laws, allowing an estimated 17,000 outdated power stations and factories to increase their carbon emissions with impunity.
Critics of draft regulations due to be unveiled by the US environmental protection agency next week say they amount to a death knell for the Clean Air Act, the centrepiece of US regulation.
The rules could represent the biggest defeat for American environmentalists since the Bush administration abandoned the Kyoto Treaty on global warming two years ago. But the energy industry welcomed them, saying they were essential for maintaining coal-fired power stations.
Now a word of caution here: the link is to the Guardian so the story may not be true at all. It may just be the product of their febrile imaginations (Next week: “Bush adds fresh babies to Whitehouse menu”). However, I certainly hope it is true and not just because it would mean good news for US industry and prosperity but also because it drives home the old lesson that being hated has its definite advantages. At a stroke, George Bush will have lifted a millstone from the neck of his country without doing the slightest harm to either his reputation or chances of re-election.
The devil may not have all the best tunes. He just has the freedom to whistle them.
Here’s an article by Tom DeWeese of NewsWithViews.com, entitled Total Surveillance Equals Total Tyranny.
First three paragraphs:
In the name of fighting terrorism a new kind of government is being implemented in Washington, D.C. We are witnessing the birth of a powerful multi-billion dollar surveillance lobby consisting of an army of special interest groups, Washington lawyers, lobbyists, and high-tech firms with wares to sell.
The personal rights of American citizens, protected until now by the Bill of Rights, are the farthest thing from their minds as they seek to fill their pockets while enabling government to monitor and control our lives to a degree unheard of prior to September 11, 2001. This army seeks riches as it pushes for laws and regulations to spy on and control the lives of law-abiding Americans.
The Government Electronics and Information Technology Association (GEIA) reports that there are more than 100 federal entities involved in forging the largest conglomeration of government-private contractor interests since the creation of the Pentagon. GEIA represents hundreds of corporate members seeking to cash in on the Homeland Security-citizen-surveillance-spending spree.
The counter-terrorist-industrial complex?
For reasons best known to themselves the proprietors of the British tabloid newspaper the Daily Mail have elected not make the contents available on-line. As a result I cannot link to this story, so thanks are due to Dr.Chris Tame for posting it to the Libertarian Alliance Forum:
I went to a cafe in central London to meet a stranger.
I handed over £1,300 and a mere 48 hours to assume the new identity of ‘Odette Hinault’ complete with fake EU passport, driving licence and French ID card, together with a genuine National Insurance number. Within a day of becoming ‘Miss Hinault’ she had opened a bank account, registered with a GP, obtained a phone number and had claim forms for housing allowances and council tax benefits.
There was nothing to stop her plugging into an entire system of state handouts that would have more than repaid her £1,300 outlay within weeks.
So says a Daily Mail reporter called Sue Reid who went undercover (presumably) and succeeded in obtaining all manner of forged official documents.
Two of the many oft-floated (and disposable) justifications for establishing a national ID card system are that it will a) stop illegal immigration (or, at least, make it a lot harder to do) and b) stop cheats from defrauding the welfare state (or, at least, make it much harder to do).
Ms.Reid’s investigations prove pretty conclusively that both claims are manifest rubbish.
Anyone who isn’t exhausted by this subject, will be after slogging through the comprehensive job of heavy lifting over at a spin-off post on the Smallest Minority blog.
This is the post I would have put up if I wasn’t so damn lazy. Many statistics, and a heaping helping of good sense. Extra bonus points for the Jesse Jackson quote!
One of the premier rent-seekers in the US, Jesse Jackson, appears to be off his game. Jesse has long run what amounts to a protection racket, in which he threatens to invoke the anti-discrimination laws and boycotts against any company that doesn’t pony up to one of his phony charities.
To take one gruesome example from the book: In 1981, Mr. Jackson struck up a “covenant” with Coca-Cola in which the company not only agreed to change overseas policies but, more to the point, provided profitable distributorships to black businessmen–including Mr. Jackson’s half-brother, Noah Robinson, later convicted of racketeering, drug trafficking and murder-by-hire.
However, Jesse has made a number of gaffes and missteps in recent years that may have undercut his little empire.
His shot at the membership policies of the Augusta National Golf Club had flown straight into a water hazard. His complaints about the jokes in the movie “Barbershop” were dismissed as raving. And it wasn’t so long ago that he was outed for his close and fruitful relations with a female staff member of his Citizenship Educational Fund, a scandal that occasioned a trip into the political wilderness that lasted most of a weekend. Finally, Kenneth Timmerman’s “Shakedown,” published last year, detailed his lucrative intimidation habits, with Mr. Jackson threatening charges of racism unless corporations adjusted their policies and gave “willingly” to various causes.
The sooner Jesse disappears from the public stage, the better off we will all be. Let’s hope that day is coming soon.
This, linked to by the ever caring and concerned Dave Barry, gives a whole new meaning to the word freedom:
sacfree makes your sac free! In former times there were boxershorts or slips. Today there is sacfree, the first boxerslip of the world. sacfree brings you pleasant liberty (“bringt dir angenehme Freiheit”) and defines your necessity.
Briefly: A new dimension of comfort and liberty for your balls. And … sacfree is sexy.
Any ladies or gay gentlemen care to comment on that last claim?
Foreigners mishandling their private parts and the English language. Samizdata never lets you down.
But, watch out when some Germans want to define your necessity.
In a post about a month ago, I detailed the rubber-gloved rise of the rubbish inspectors, the latest bunch of useless bureaucrats to feast upon the fat of Britain’s once glorious but increasingly manacled land.
It seems their army is still on the march to its place in the sun of the regulatory annals of glory. As part of the excellent Stephen Robinson’s Free Country series, Mr Robinson details how these rubbish inspectors are now to increase their own powers of land rulership.
Now that the problem of fly-tipping has grown exponentially over the last few years, due to idiotarian government policies on landfill taxes and fridge disposal, instead of the government finding fly-tipping miscreants and protecting people’s property, it is going to punish these injured parties if they don’t foot the bill themselves to enforce the government’s policies against fly-tipping. Which is simply splendid, don’t you think?
(Fly-tipping is the process where expensive-to-dispose-of waste is dumped illegally upon other people’s property.)
So where you used to think you paid taxes to the state, so they would provide a minimal level of defence against your property, and your person, against ne’er-do-wells, now they’re going to punish you for the actions of these other low-lifes, and still charge you for the police, without actually giving you the benefit of their protection. No doubt as well as having to set up CCTV around your property, for the government’s eye-spy benefit, you will have to pay to have any fly-tipped rubbish on your land sent to government waste disposal centres. Where obviously you will be asked to pay your full quota of landfill taxes, on someone else’s rubbish. And if you don’t do this, the government will, of course, send the boys-in-blue round to make you.
Doesn’t this remind you of anything? A mafia protection racket, for instance?
All round the government is a winner. It gets more cameras, for free, and more revenue, for free, and the UK’s citizens are wrapped up in yet another layer of interfering regulation, and still HMG can sit smugly around whatever’s left of the Kyoto protocol table to claim that Her Majesty’s Government is the font of all light and all goodness. Doesn’t it make you proud to be British?
Here’s a description of a helpful and amusing mapping system that they’ve developed in Amsterdam, linked to by David Sucher.
For the exhibition Maps of Amsterdam 1866-2000 at the Amsterdam City Archive Waag Society together with Esther Polak have set up the Amsterdam RealTime project.
Every inhabitant of Amsterdam has an invisble map of the city in his head. The way he moves about the city and the choices made in this process are determined by this mental map. Amsterdam RealTime attampts to visualize these mental maps through examining the mobile behaviour of the city’s users.
During two months (3 Oct to 1 Dec 2002) all of Amsterdam’s residents are invited to be equipped with a tracer-unit. This is a portable device developed by Waag Society which is equipped with GPS: Global Positioning System. Using satellite data the tracer calculates its geographical position. Therse tracers’ data are sent in realtime to a central point. By visualizing this data against a black background traces, lines, appear. From these lines a (partial) map of Amsterdam constructs itself. This map does not register streets or blocks of houses, but consists of the sheer movements of real pepole.
When the different types of users draw their lines, it becomes clear to the viewer just how individual the map of amsterdam can be. A cyclist will produce completley different favourite routes than someone driving a car. The means of transport, the location of home, work or other activities together with the mental map of the particular person determine the traces he leaves. This way an everchanging, very recent, and very subjective map of Amsterdam will come about. If you spend (or should we say move) a good amount of time within the ‘ring’ of the Amsterdam A10 Highway, you can apply here
for becoming a testperson during rhe testing and development-stage or for becoming a participant during the time of the exhibition. Participants receive a print of their personal routes through the city, their diary in traces.
As Sucher says, this could be
…the first step to charging for street use. Or more.
My attitude to charging for street use is: if it’s your street? … But: “Or more.” Exactly. The whole point of the Internet is that we don’t each of us, separately, any longer have to do our own personal filing. The great Giant Filing Cabinet in the Sky can do our filing for us, and we can share each other’s files. There are huge advantages to this process. Huge.
But what are the disadvantages? Who else gets to look at your “personal” files, and what use to they make of what they learn? The White Rose agenda is, among things: the disadvantages of the Internet. What if they price we pay for this thing ends up being a whole lot more than just the price of getting connected to it?
White Rose: Depress yourself about the future of technology.
Just a reminder to anyone planning to tour Britain, this bank holiday weekend, by rail. Well, the bad news is, you can’t. The good news is that the cricket’s on.
That useless subsidy-addicted creature of government, Network Rail, has decided to shut down large parts of the rail network in order to create road chaos, sorry, in order to carry out essential engineering work. For instance, if you’re a small bear from Peru, with a fondness for marmalade, hoping to stowaway on a Great Western locomotive from Bristol to London, this weekend, don’t do it. Otherwise a whole series of books about you in the future will have to be named ‘The Adventures of Reading Bear’. Paddington station is closed.
If you’re old enough and stupid enough to remember voting for Mr Tony Blair, in 1997, on the back of the glittering promise that he would sort out Britain’s transport system, you’ll by now have realised that we only get what we wish for. For he’s well and truly sorted it, by turning it into a snake-pit! Why doesn’t the fool just hand it over to the Transport Blog, who’ll make a much better fist of it?
I myself shall be attempting to navigate a path, to Victoria, to take a train to Worthing to visit my mother-in-law (Reginald Perrin fans, please note, I am not making this up.) Let’s hope it’s not as warm and humid down in the Tube, this afternoon, as it was this morning on the Bakerloo line, where I literally thought I was going to liquefy. Yes, literally become a puddle of once human flesh.
I shall be imbibing a ridiculously over-sized bucket of iced gin and slim-line tonic, the moment I descend the steps at Worthing station, if I should get there before midnight. My advice to everyone else who can, is stay at home.
For those poor blighters, like me, having to travel: Good luck, everyone!
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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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