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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It is strangely comforting to see that the ‘class war’ instincts of old Labour are not entirely dead yet:
John Reid, the Health Secretary, yesterday dismissed the demand for a blanket ban on smoking as “an obsession of the learned middle class”.
Speaking at a Labour Party event, he said he was reluctant to use compulsion to outlaw something that was a source of pleasure, particularly to working class people.
That Mr. Reid has to fight the corner of working-class people at a Labour Party event speaks volumes about the evolutionary path of the modern left.
Earlier, Mr Reid expressed his views even more bluntly when he took part in a round-table discussion with some of those invited to contribute to the consultation.
Told that they were discussing a smoking ban, Mr Reid said: “Let me play devil’s advocate. What enjoyment does a 21-year-old mother of three living on a sink estate get? The only enjoyment sometimes they get is having a cigarette.”
One participant objected quite strongly, telling Mr Reid her mother died of lung cancer.
But Mr Reid, a former chain smoker who has now given up, said it was best to provide people with information and let them decide what to do for themselves.
Now, perhaps, Mr. Reid can take the next logical step and denounce the levels of tax that working people have to pony up in order to enjoy their smoking habit. Then the bien-pensant can safely re-classify him as a ‘right-winger’.
Ronald Reagan was, as we know, dubbed among other things as “The Great Communicator”. Through his speeches, radio broadcasts and writings, Reagan had a wonderful knack of communicating important truths in clear-cut ways.
What intrigues me is wondering what he would have made of this new field of blogging. I reckon he would have loved it and could easily imagine the old fella writing one. As a talk-radio host, he had a lot to say that would have fitted in perfectly with the weblog format. I have recently been reading a collection of his radio show broadcast transcripts and it blasts the idea of him being a dope. Anything but, in fact.
Reagan was eager to make full use of the modern technologies of his time in spreading his views about the role of government, capitalism, the evils of communism and the like. I don’t think it impertinent to imagine that this great man would have loved our medium and enjoyed the fact of its challenge to Big Media. I wonder what he’d have called his weblog. How about “Shining City on a Hill”?
Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures: A True Story from Hell on Earth
Heidi Postlewait, Kenneth Cain and Andrew Thomson
Miramax Books, 2004
It is a shame that many readers will dismiss this book as outlandish or flippant simply because of its, uh, provocative title. Much of the press the book has received has been related to the “expose” angle of the book, with its promise of seamy tales of corruption, incompetence, sexual license and even drug abuse by UN officials. This is also a shame, because the book is so much more than an expose. If you have already made up your mind that the UN is hopeless, this is NOT the book to pick up in the hopes of gloating over UN policy failures in Rwanda, Bosnia and Haiti. Instead, Emergency Sex is an incredibly moving book and an addictive read, documenting tragedy, love, heartbreak, adventure and the friendship of the three co-authors.
The authors take turns telling the narrative, but their gifted writing meshes together so seamlessly that one often forgets whose turn it is to develop the story further. The authors met in Cambodia in the early ’90s, as part of a team that was monitoring the election there. Heidi joined the UN after leaving her husband, a successful Manhattan modeling agent, in search of adventure. Ken, youngest of the trio, hires into the UN as an attorney after graduating from Harvard Law School – he is the book’s most intriguing character, vacillating between cynicism and naivete, at times brutally critical of the UN but at the same time remaining on board with the program. And finally there is Andrew, the New Zealand-born doctor who went to work at a Red Cross hospital in Phnom Penh after meeting a survivor of the Khmer Rouge holocaust while in med school. → Continue reading: Book Review: Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures
Plans for a national ID card scheme risk changing the relationship between the British state and its citizens, the information watchdog has warned.
Richard Thomas, Information Commissioner, said he had initially greeted the plans with “healthy scepticism” but the details had changed his view to “increasing alarm”. The government hopes a pilot scheme will pave the way for compulsory identity cards within the next decade. Mr Thomas told MPs the scheme was “unprecedented” in international terms.
Mr Thomas told the MPs that it was now clear the scheme was not just about identity cards but about a national identity register.
This is beginning to represent a really significant sea change in the relationship between state and every individual in this country.
It is not just about citizens having a piece of plastic to identify themselves. It’s about the amount, the nature of the information held about every citizen and how that’s going to be used in a wide range of activities.
Mr Thomas said that if the ID cards did work out as the government planned they would be “a very, very attractive proposition for criminals”.
Yes, let’s see whether Mr Thomas’s words make any difference to Big Blunkett… I guess not.
The folks in Iowa have got their market up and running for the 2004 Presidential election. Each contract pays a dollar; as of yesterday, you can spend just over 58 cents on a Bush contract, and around 43 cents on a Kerry contract. As you can see, the futures market is bullish for Bush (hmm, there’s a slogan in there somewhere, possibly with an R rated logo) as compared to the opinion polls (right hand column, scroll down a little for a summary/average of current polling – very handy for the political junky).
The Iowa market is worth keeping an eye on – over the last several elections, it has half the forecast error of the opinion polls.
Update: For those hankering to put their money where there mouth is, and perhaps fleece a few rubes, the main page for the Iowa Electronic Futures Market is here. Sadly, there is a $500 cap on positions.
Whoever came up with all this tosh about the world being a ‘global village’? Seems to me that different parts of the world have a very different way of going about things.
In Saudi Arabia, a BBC reporter gets gunned down and lies bleeding in the street:
Police said Mr Gardner tried to get bystanders to help him as he lay wounded in the street by crying out that he was a Muslim.
Now I like to think that here in dear old Blighty, we would rush to the aid of a badly wounded human being regardless of his religion.
Oh, unless the police are around to stop us:
A police force was accused yesterday of waiting too long to act after a shooting at a family barbecue left two sisters dead. One witness claimed that their lives could have been saved.
Roy Gibson, 70, said he spent an hour waiting for help to arrive as he tried to save one of the women. Paramedics were prevented from entering until Thames Valley Police had completed a one-hour assessment of any further risk to life.
By which time, there was definitely no risk to life because the victims were no longer alive.
That poor man in the straightjacket is having nightmares again. He is crying out in his sleep and banging his head off the walls: [note: link to article in UK Times may not be available to readers outside of UK]
EUROPEAN governments are to scrap dozens of “unnecessary” and “patronising” EU laws and directives under a plan to make the Union less bureaucratic and more in touch with the lives of its citizens.
The “bonfire of the diktats” will put an end to Europe-wide rules on the length of ladders that window cleaners can use, and laws on the materials that have to be used for children’s playgrounds.
The ambitious plan to roll back the rules made by the European Commission, which is being championed by the Dutch Government and supported by Britain, is a response to the growing concern that Brussels interferes too much in daily life, and that more decisions should be left to national governments.
About half of all laws in Britain are drawn up in Brussels and then adopted by Westminster. For environmental legislation, nearly 90 per cent of laws are made in Brussels, with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs threatened with fines if it does not put them into effect. There are 2,500 EU directives in force, with hundreds added every year.
A bit of ‘nice-guy’ PR for the run-up to the European Parliament elections to get us in a positive frame of mind. It is just a tease really. Seldom have I seen a proposal that is going nowhere on so many levels.
For every regulation they manage to scrap, two more will pop up to replace it. And even if they somehow manage to stop Brussels producing more laws, they will simply be minted at national level instead. That is what governments do. They have no other skills to offer the marketplace.
Persuading government not to enact new laws is like trying to persuade birds not to fly. You cannot change the nature of the beast. You have to clip its wings.
When I am not lurking and posting here in Samizdata.net, I earn my daily crust selling blogging expertise to companies via The Big Blog Company. Business seems to be picking up as increasing numbers of people in boardrooms are getting more clueful about what a blog (or blogs) can do for them, and so… we are looking for a couple people who might be interested in helping out on an independent, project by project basis.
London location would be ideal – face-to-face just has so much higher bandwidth – but we would certainly consider working virtually with someone more or less anywhere provided they have broadband. Our tech guru Henry spells out here what he would like. → Continue reading: Looking for some web savants
When told once too often that President Reagan was ‘just rhetoric’ (“he did not reduce governement spending, either in California or with the Federal government, he did not get rid of X regulation, he did not…”) the late M.A. Bradford replied “You will miss that rhetoric when he is gone”.
Ronald Reagan has gone, and I do miss the rhetoric – and I miss him.
“Even our dogs and cats are fat … and it’s not because they’re watching too much advertising.”
and
There’s lots of things government can do, but I don’t think government can prevent children from nagging their parents.
-Timothy Muris, head of the US Federal Trade Commission
This is oh so typical. Support Marxism and Islamo-fascism, and you get French police protection… support the USA and you get arrested.
In what may one day give people a way to keep even GCHQ and the NSA out of their private affairs without them makes a huge effort, quantum cryptography is starting to finally emerge as a useable technology.
I look forward to the day the entire global communications network is a less friendly place for systems like Echelon and Carnivore.
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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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