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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Did you know your twenty dollar bills have RFID tags in them? That is what these people think… and they have the burned bills to prove it.
A year or so ago I suggested microwaving as a way to de-louse items with RFID tags in them. From the state of the bills in the picture, I think we will need a gentler method of disinfection.
It is apparent to me that the chips are just soaking up too much energy from the rather high intensity inside an oven. It doesn’t really take all that much to waste a chip so a much milder power source is called for. Suggestions and experimental results are welcome.
All you need is some engineering creativity and money to burn.
HM Tax Collectors are burning out, cracking up and breaking down. They cannot take it anymore. They can not eat, they can not sleep and they do not know which way to turn.
THEY NEED HELP!!!
If your tax affairs are driving you to despair, spare a thought for the Inland Revenue. It has been forced to call in the Samaritans to help to train staff driven close to the edge by dealing with irate callers struggling with the tax system.
The charity, vastly experienced in helping people who are depressed or on the verge of suicide, has been hired to train around 2,000 Revenue staff who take calls from the public.
The idea is to enable them to be more empathetic when dealing with taxpayers who have reached the end of their tether after trying to understand the shambolic tax credits system or fathom out their self-assessment form.
Or maybe it is taxpayers that are melting down? Or is it both? Who can tell? We are all going crazy round here.
Emotional training is not cheap. The Samaritans normally charge £1,500 a day for this service; it would not disclose yesterday how much the Revenue was being charged.
The ‘revenue’ is not paying a penny. Somebody better get on the telephone to those untethered taxpayers and tell them the bad news. It is all their fault anyway. Then they will get even more angry and the Revenue staff will get even more stressed and then they will need even more therapy and… How deep does this rabbit-hole go?
Perhaps the problem could be alleviated by sending the entire staff of the Inland Revenue off on a holiday… for a few years!
Last night I actually went out, to a cinema, to see a film, with some friends. No pause button, no stopping if bored, no incoming phone calls, no life at all, except watching and listening to and thinking about the film. And then after that, sparkling conversation, in a restaurant. Very peculiar. Very delightful.
The film was The Barbarian Invasions, which was the movie that got the Best Foreign Film Oscar (just as Michael Jennings hoped it would) on account of Lord of the Rings Part 3 (and I seem to recall someone thanking Lord of the Rings 3 for this on Oscar night itself) not having been a foreign film.
Preliminary googling while I gathered my thoughts about this movie got me to this review of the movie by Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian back in February, which is one of the most fatuously wrong-headeed pieces of writing I have ever had the good fortune to read and laugh out loud in amazement at. Bradshaw gets hold of the stick all right, but at totally the wrong end.
The story concerns a bunch of reunited lefties left over from an earlier film, which I haven’t seen, one of who is a certain Rémy, who is now … well, let Bradshaw tell it:
Rémy is now grown into his 50s and hospitalised with a fatal tumour in his home town of Montréal, insisting on state care and railing against the barbarians of philistinism and extremism destroying the world. His wealthy merchant banker son Sébastien (Stéphane Rousseau), described by Rémy as a “puritan capitalist” in contradistinction to his own “socialist hedonism”, is still angry with him for breaking up the family home but is nevertheless prevailed upon to return to his bedside, and the slow process of reconciliation begins; Sébastien gets on his mobile to reassemble all Rémy’s old friends and lovers.
So far so good. Nothing wrong with that. That is what happens. But now Bradshaw careers ludicrously off the rails: → Continue reading: The Barbarian Invasions – the future belongs to me (but not to Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian)
One of the many perils associated with declining birthrates is that it makes it much easier for the social-working classes to nationalise children:
Every local authority in England will be required to appoint a director of children’s services in a bid to improve child welfare under legislation due to be unveiled by the government.
An “information hub” will be set up in 150 local authorities to record details of all the children in the area. Each child will have an electronic file – including their name, address, date of birth, school and GP – that states whether they are known to social services, education welfare, police, or youth offending teams.
Other measures expected in the bill include the creation of a children’s commissioner for England, who would protect the rights of children and young people, and statutory children’s safeguarding boards, responsible for coordinating local child protection work among social services, the NHS, the police and other agencies.
Only they don’t call it ‘nationalisation’ any more. Now they call it ‘protection’ but it amounts to same thing.
Sometimes, just occasionally mind, I actually quite miss the old-style firebrand lefties and their revolutionary rhetoric. At least they were honest and open about their ambitions and, in many ways, that made it a lot easier to tackle them head-on.
Slowjoe has spotted something calculated to start teeth grinding here on Samizdata.net
The Register talks about an attempt by the EU to railroad through the Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive.
It appears to give the ‘rights holder’ carte blanche… almost the right to set up a private police force.
The interesting thing is that the rapporteur did an end-run around any debate. She also happens to be the wife of the head of Vivendi Universal.
Slowjoe
This posting would normally be on my Culture Blog, but trade seems to have been somewhat thin here today, so I will put this here.
For some time now I’ve been wondering about this newly completed building, a new Selfridges in Birmingham. (Selfridges is a department store chain.) Some of the images at the other end of this link were faked up beforehand, others were photos of the real thing. It is the one that looks as if it is covered in giant white Smarties, or maybe frisbees.
I have not seen this building in the flesh, if that is the right word, and with architecture, no matter how good the photos, you can never really be sure unless you see it for real. But, based on what I have seen in photos, these and others, I dislike this thing a lot. It looks like the architectural equivalent of something you would find in a seriously tacky gift shop, the kind of shopt that is full of the kind of gifts that you really would not want to be given. Only the inside view of the covered-over footbridge rises above the worst sort of kitsch.
Here is what I think. It is the kind of building which needs to be surrounded by really stylish other buildings, old or new, but preferably old. This is because it makes you look very carefully at all the buildings around it, much more carefully than you normally would. For although not itself in any way beautiful, this is a building that definitely draws attention to itself. (In this respect it is not the only piece of new architecture which behaves like this. You see lots of new buildings which have this kind of effect.)
But the trouble with this Selfridges Birmingham is that it seems to be surrounded by utterly undistinguished buildings. The last thing you want is a building which draws attention to all these dreary structures. There is one church not that far away with a bit of style to it. But one semi-stylish church semi-nearby is not enough.
Let me rephrase all of the above. I think this is what I think about this thing. I am truly open to persuasion, especially of course from anyone who has actually set eyes on the real thing. It could be that if I actually saw the giant Smarties, I would be truly impressed.
The good news is that architects in Britain are now, and actually have been for some years now, at least trying to create stylish and exciting buildings. This one certainly gets A for effort. It certainly puts its head above the aesthetic parapet.
But personally, I just do not like it.
What does anyone else think?
Indian: A History
John Keay
HarperCollins, 2001
Soldier Sahibs: The Men Who Made the North-West Frontier
Charles Allen
Abacus (paperback), 2001 (first published in hardback 2000)
I have to begin with a confession: John Keay’s big and excellent book (576 pages, including notes, bibliography and index) is the first history of India I have read right through, though I have consulted and skimmed through others on my shelves. So it is impossible to keep in my head even the mainstream facts. From its final chapter, Crossing the Tracks, 1948 –, a metaphor of the historian’s journey “who … must get down from the air-conditioned express … cross the tracks and elbow his way aboard a slower, noisier train”, I gather that in it “India” no longer includes Pakistan, or even Bangladesh, a narrowing from the previous inclusive vista of the whole sub-continent. This may be a concession (together with others) to the fact that the title page gives “HarperCollins Publishers India” below “HarperCollins Publishers London” [their italics].
Indian nationalists may make grandiose claims for the age of their civilization, but the fact remains that its documentation does not really exist before the first Moslem incursion in the 8th century. The first civilizations so far discovered, Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, which are of course in territory now in Pakistan, cannot be linked with any other, even negatively by being shown convincingly to have been destroyed by the incoming Aryans, whose religion, the treatment of which is understandably sketchy, though not language, penetrated to the end of the peninsula; the history of Ceylon is left out.
Within this anonymous era, sparsely illuminated by oral myths and some inscriptions, there are a few peaks, such as Alexander’s invasion, which left written history behind it, in Greek. “Ashoka … India’s first defined historical personality” (p. 95 – never mind Porus), died in 231 BC, left some jargon-free, high-minded edicts carved on stone monuments – “extending from Orissa to Mysore, Bombay, Junagadh, Kandahar, Peshawar and Dehra Dun” – and, after uniting much of northern and central India, left an empire that quickly fell to pieces – like many other subsequent ones.. → Continue reading: A history of India and a history of the Indian Mutiny
This is a great piece. Since I have no idea whether it will remain internet-readable, and since I think it should for all eternity, here is all of it:
RFID Tags in New US Notes Explode When You Try to Microwave Them
Adapted from a letter sent to Henry Makow Ph.D.
Want to share an event with you, that we experienced this evening.. Dave had over $1000 dollars in his back pocket (in his wallet). New twenties were the lion share of the bills in his wallet. We walked into a truck stop/travel plaza and they have those new electronic monitors that are supposed to say if you are stealing something. But through every monitor, Dave set it off. He did not have anything to purchase in his hands or pockets. After numerous times of setting off these monitors, a person approached Dave with a ‘wand’ to swipe why he was setting off the monitors.
Believe it or not, it was his ‘wallet’. That is according to the minimum wage employees working at the truck stop! We then walked across the street to a store and purchased aluminum foil. We then wrapped our cash in foil and went thru the same monitors. No monitor went off.
We could have left it at that, but we have also paid attention to the European Union and the ‘rfid’ tracking devices placed in their money, and the blatant bragging of Walmart and many corporations of using ‘rfid’ electronics on every marketable item by the year 2005.
Dave and I have brainstormed the fact that most items can be ‘microwaved’ to fry the ‘rfid’ chip, thus elimination of tracking by our government.
So we chose to ‘microwave’ our cash, over $1000 in twenties in a stack, not spread out on a carasoul. Do you know what exploded on American money?? The right eye of Andrew Jackson on the new twenty, every bill was uniform in it’s burning… Isnt that interesting?
Now we have to take all of our bills to the bank and have them replaced, cause they are now ‘burnt’.
We will now be wrapping all of our larger bills in foil on a regular basis.
What we resent is the fact that the government or a corporation can track our ‘cash’. Credit purchases and check purchases have been tracked for years, but cash was not traceble until now …
Dave and Denise
Well said Dave and Denise, and well done. And dont you listen to all tho’s other people, your great at grammar and spelln and punctuationising. And thank you Dave Barry for the link to the story. Well, I think it must have been him, but I can find no mention of this story there. So how did I find out about this? (Update Wed 4: I remember now. All is explained here. So the link was via Dave Barry, but only via something else.)
Anyway, apologies if this has already been covered here. I’ve just realised that I haven’t checked. Also, I have no idea at all when this originally got written. It could have been years ago for all I know. I did a posting on Ubersportingpundit about a rugby player who was tackling people by sticking his hand up his opponents’ bottoms (true), and it turned out the story was about three years old. Imagine how embarrassed I was about that.
Amidst all the partying I did in Brussels last weekend, I somehow managed to find the time to actually learn a thing or two.
The first thing I learned was not everyone takes the Euro terribly seriously (while fiddling around for correct change to pay for a taxi, I let the words ‘Mickey Mouse money’ slip from my mouth whereupon the taxi driver began laughing and said “oui, Monsieur, oui”).
Secondly, and rather less anecdotally, I also learned of something called the Stockholm Network. Before last weekend I had no idea that this organisation even existed and, in this case, ignorance was not bliss.
I think it fair to say that there is a widespread impression in the Anglosphere (especially the American bit) that the continent of Europe has fallen under the unbreakable spell of the Grand Wizards of Schtoopidity. Sadly, this is mostly true. But it is not completely true and the difference between ‘mostly’ and ‘completely’ can be found at the website of the Stockholm Network.
Billing themselves as ‘Europe’s only dedicated service organisation for market-oriented think tanks and thinkers’, the website is contains a treasure trove of links to well-organised, well-funded and highly active free-market and libertarian think-tanks and organisation in Britain, Ireland, Albania, Finland, Turkey, Macedonia, Switzerland, Sweden, Portugal, Serbia, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Poland, Italy, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Holland, Norway, Spain, Russia, Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Croatia, Estonia, Rumania, Georgia, the Ukraine and elsewhere.
The idiots and the kleptocrats may be running the show for now but, pleasingly, there are pockets of determined guerilla resistance. Even more pleasingly, these pockets seem to be growing in number.
And that is all I am going to say on the matter. Otherwise there is a danger that I might start sounding optimistic and, as everybody knows, that is strictly against my religion.
One of the very few benefits of Tony Blair being Prime Minister is that he and his supporters are hollowing out the Labour Party :
Labour was in disarray about how to deal with its “serial rebels” after splits emerged among ministers last night over high risk plans to bar dissident MPs from standing at the next election.
Miss Armstrong – furious at mass rebellions over top-up fees, foundation hospitals and curbs on asylum seekers – wanted rebels to know they could be deselected by the party’s ruling National Executive Committee unless they pledged loyalty to Tony Blair.
To watch a time-honoured institution like the British Labour Party rip itself asunder is tragic. Just tragic.
One of the most potent anti-liberty memes has been that simple phrase, the “Wild West”. Wild as in lawless, violent, murderous. And one of the most potent pro-liberty memes is therefore, if only because it negates the first meme, the fact that the Wild West was, in the words of a famous Journal of Libertarian Studies article by Terry Anderson, the Not So Wild Wild West.
Here is another article, The American West: A Heritage of Peace by Ryan McMaken, dealing with the history of the West, and with the history of its history, in the form of Western novels and of course “westerns”, that is to say movies set in that Wild Wild West. This makes similar points to those made by Terry Anderson, and the one link in McMaken’s article is to Anderson’s.
McMaken ends his article thus:
Unfortunately for novelists and filmmakers, the American West was far less exciting than we have long been led to believe. The frontiersmen knew this themselves. In his old age, Buffalo Bill Cody, one of the most flamboyant architects of our perceptions of the West, openly admitted to lying about his violent exploits to sell more dime novels. He was, after all, wounded in battle with Indians exactly once, not 137 times as he claimed. And such tales are no doubt popular with many Americans today who seem increasingly open to believing almost anything about the West as long as it is simultaneously exciting and violent and bleak.
As with so many success stories, however, the story of the West is primarily a story of hard work, trade, tedium, and peace. The original mythmakers would have us believe that the settlement of the West was some kind of crusade. A war of righteous American legions against everybody else. In reality, there were no legions, and there was certainly very little righteousness.
There were men and women trying to make a better life for themselves, acting under their own will, and pursuing their own ends. On the other end of the spectrum, the purveyors of the new Western victimology would have us believe that these individuals brought with them messiah complexes and violent tendencies which would never be brought under control until “civilization” caught up with them. Yet, the messiah complexes, the “Manifest Destiny,” and the raging violence have always mostly resided in the minds of politicians, pundits, novelists, and movie directors; none of whom ever tamed any land harsher then their own back yards.
As I say, this is a familiar theme among libertarians. I thank my fellow London libertarian Patrick Crozier for alerting me to this piece, and I also checked through the archives here just to make sure that no Samizdatistas had already commented on it. This is familiar stuff – but familiar because so persuasive and important, and for that reason, worth any amount of supportive comment.
I occasionally buy a magazine called The Week, which contains, or so it claims on its front, “the best of the British and foreign media”. How pleasing to see Britain counting unapologetically for about as much as the rest of the world put together, and as the first of these two equals. Quite right.
Joking aside, on page 26 of the Feb 28 issue, there is this letter:
To: The Guardian
As a scientist of no fixed political position, but deeply involved in climate science and sea-level changes, I agree with Diana Liverman that we must exercise caution with the Earth. Likewise, we must not confuse facts and fiction, nor justify wishes with falsification.
As president of an international commission on sea-level changes and coastal evolution, I launched a Maldives research project. Observational data obtained by our international team of experts shows conclusively that the sea level is not rising, unlike fictions propagated by many who are not specialists.
Nils-Axel Morner, Stockholm University
I have read more grammatically perfect written English than this. I mean, what exactly does it mean to “justify wishes with falsification”? And although the attempted meaning of that final sentence is clear enough, its actual wording is something of a muddle. One expects better English from Scandinavians. Nevertheless, the most important bit, where it says that “the sea level is not rising”, is clear as clear can be.
That international commission would presumably be these people.
Interesting, I think. And good on The Guardian for printing the letter.
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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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