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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I think I have settled on my nomination for Most Frightening Story of the Year. Given the current political climate, the competition for this prestigious title is ferocious but, having carefully assessed the many excellent candidates, I have to put this one forward as the front-runner:
A radical scheme to vaccinate children against future drug addiction is being considered by ministers, The Independent on Sunday can reveal.
Under the plans, doctors would immunise children at risk of becoming smokers or drug users with an injection. The scheme could operate in a similar way to the current nationwide measles, mumps and rubella vaccination programme.
What they mean is that it will be shuffled in under the same ‘health’ rubrics.
Childhood immunisation would provide adults with protection from the euphoria that is experienced by users, making drugs such as heroin and cocaine pointless to take. Such vaccinations are being developed by pharmaceutical companies and are due to hit the market within two years.
Note the use of the word ‘protection’. As if emotions are an affliction from which we need to be spared. I wonder what else can be neutralised? Hate? Love? Anger? Curiosity? Rebelliousness? Will this herald the age of ‘Stepford’ kids?
The Department of Trade and Industry has set up a special project to investigate ways of using new scientific breakthroughs to combat drug and nicotine addiction.
To add to all the carnage already caused by the psychotic Conservative drug war, it has now provided a legitimising ideology for these fantasies of chemical zombification.
This used to be the state of Britain in the 1970s; a reference to the relative economic decline that accompanied the imperial scuttle. Now, we should use the term in another sense: the transition of the National Health Service from modernity to the Middle Ages.
If you enter a National Health Service hospital, there is a high risk of contracting an infection caused by a dugs resistant bacteria called MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus), which the tabloids have dubbed “superbug”. There are numerous stories of patients, who have no choice but to use state provision, due to its monopolistic powers, and have contracted this infection as a consequence. There is one poor unfortunate who has been MRSA positive eight times.
A grandmother who has contracted the MRSA superbug eight times is refusing to return to hospital for a vital operation.
Doctors warned Marjorie Evans, 69, she could die or be bedridden for the rest of her life if she is hit by the infection again. She plans to travel abroad for her hip replacement rather than trust a British hospital. Mrs Evans has caught MRSA during inpatient stays at Morriston Hospital in Swansea since 1992.
One of the major causes of these infections is the inability of NHS hospitals to maintain minimum levels of cleanliness, such as insisting all visitors wash their hands. Once drugs-resistant bacteria have taken hold, they are difficult to eradicate. However, there is an alternative, the private sector:
BMI Healthcare is one of the biggest private hospital groups in the UK, with 47 hospitals. During the course of a year, the group has a quarter of a million in-patients and three-quarters of a million out-patient visits. How many patients in BMI hospitals have acquired MRSA in the blood? None. In fact, over the years, the company has “never” had such a case.
If you do come to Britain, avoid the NHS. For if they do manage to kill you, a task they achieve with ease, you may still not be given last rites as the religious affiliation of your dying husk cannot be disclosed under the Data Protection Act.
The Hospital Chaplaincies Council has criticised several NHS Trusts for their “hysterical” refusal to disclose the religious backgrounds of their patients. The trusts claim that such information is “too sensitive” to share with chaplains.
All the extravagance and incompetence of our present government is due, in the main, to lawyers.They are responsible for nine-tenths of the useless and vicious laws that now clutter the statute-books, and for all the evils that go with the vain attempt to enforce them. Every Federal judge is a lawyer. So are most Congressmen. Every invasion of the plain rights of the citizen has a lawyer behind it. If all lawyers were hanged tomorrow, and their bones sold to a mah jong factory, we’d all be freer and safer, and our taxes would be reduced by almost a half.
– H.L. Mencken.
Just when you think that language cannot possibly become any more twisted or discourse any more debased, up pops a reminder that we still have a long way left to fall:
The 1971 shooting of students by government forces in Mexico’s so-called “dirty war” has been classified by an investigating prosecutor as genocide.
While marvelling at this breathtaking and brazen ridiculousness of this charge, I note that it is merely the opinion of a prosecutor as opposed to an official verdict. However, if it becomes an official verdict I trust that no-one will be surprised.
Like the word ‘rape’, the word ‘genocide’ has increasingly been deployed as a political trigger word and abused to the point where it has not just been devalued but is perilously close to being stripped of every smidgeon of meaning. I suppose we will have to find a new term to describe the extermination of an entire race now.
This particular case may or may not go any further but it almost does not matter. The point is that the bar has been lowered again and the occasion will not go unmarked among that class of jurists and campaigners who weave together the fabric of supranational laws.
Within ten years, charges of ‘genocide’ will be laid against people who tell racist jokes.
The Montreal Gazette has a comprehensive article about how cutting-edge technologies work as tattle-tales for a surveillance-minded state containing warnings by Canadian privacy advocates. Stephanie Perrin, president of Digital Discretion in Montreal says:
There is a widening and yawning gap between the surveillance that is actually happening and people’s understanding for the capacity for surveillance. People just have no clue, and I’m describing intelligent people. At the very broad level, we have a society that thinks it’s democratic and absolutely has no concept of what the technology does.
Personal information often lies dormant in huge data banks that people contribute to constantly – through use of everyday items such as credit cards and telephones. Increasingly, corporate, government and law enforcement entities sift through that material with sophisticated data-mining programs, looking for relationships between individuals and whatever interests them.
Cellular telephones and vehicles can be tracked, too. The term telematics refers to any marriage of location-tracking technologies, such as global positioning systems, with wireless communications, such as cellphones. Applications include General Motors’ OnStar program. The Telematics Research Group estimates that by 2008, more than 40 per cent of new vehicles in the United States will have some form of telematics.
There is no question that law enforcement agencies have used tracking technology to solve crimes, possibly save lives. It’s all relative. Knowing exactly where employees are may be reasonable in a hazardous chemical plant but less reasonable in an insurance office.
Even though I’m a screaming privacy advocate, there is an argument on the other side for this stuff. That’s what makes it so difficult and so easy to give everything away.
There is more interesting (and frightening) stuff in the article such as Privacy Timeline: The Data Trail, read the whole thing.
There is a dilemma, I agree. But I disagree about it being a straightforward trade-off between security and privacy. When it comes to everyday technologies, one way to decide how to use a particular technology is what effect it has on the individual and how much power it gives to the state over that individual.
FCW.com reports that the long-awaited 9/11 Commission report from the bipartisan commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks calls for better information sharing among government agencies, adoption of biometric technologies and the completion of a visitor tracking system as soon as possible.
The report called for better technology and training to detect terrorist travel documents and the use of biometric identifiers, or unique physical characteristics, to authenticate such documents. United States officials are taking steps already, such as requiring foreign visitors to have machine-readable, tamper-resistant passports with embedded biometric identifiers. However, commission officials said Americans should not be exempt from carrying biometric passports as well.
The Homeland Security Department should complete a biometric entry/exit screening system, called the U.S. Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology (US-VISIT) program as soon as possible, according to the report. There should be improved use of no-fly lists to screen airline passengers as discussions for revamping the Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System (CAPPS) II continue.
I so look forward to travelling to the US…
Further to Antoine’s posting yesterday, about why that old couple got killed, Alice Bachini, now that she lives in Texas, is able to make a comparison:
English person was asking me how come Austin is so crime-free and safe for kids compared to the UK?
“Well, over there,” said I, “if someone breaks into your house in the night and tries to burgle you, you can shoot him. You can even kill him, and you won’t get arrested. If someone mugs you, you can shoot them too. So that must put quite a few criminals off.”
Mentioned the Tony Martin case, and the fact that criminals are going to have guns even if they’re banned.
It has actually taken being extendedly in Texas for the last bit of Brit-bred gun-scepticism to fade from my lower cerebellum. It does feel safe in Austin. But people used to living in danger can forget what feeling safe is like. They think that danger is normal. That’s how evil ideas take control.
The trouble is that not very many people actually decide to stop living in one place and to start living in another, so these comparisons have not yet become part of the common stock of experience of mankind. And something like “safety” is not something you can see, the way you can see (or see on television) abundant goods in supermarkets or poets being politically contrary and not being arrested immediately.
The only other kind of comparison of this kind is when there is a sudden change of political regime, like the sudden change that occurred in Iraq just recently, or in Germany in 1945. One day, things are done one way, and then the next day, everything is different, even though it is the same place.
The circumstance that finally convinced me of the foolishness of English style gun control was a change of this sort that occurred in Jamaica, where, in the early nineteen seventies, they went, gunwise, from Texas to England, overnight. And so did their crime numbers.
I like to believe that if we all plug away on this issue we might eventually get somewhere.
It is particularly helpful when not obviously belligerent and sporty types like Alice and me become uncompromising supporters of the right to armed self defence. I hate guns, myself. If I lived in Texas, I would be a blatant gun free rider, being safe because others were armed. But that I should be allowed to arm myself, and that it benefits me hugely that other law-abiders are allowed to arm themselves, I have no doubt.
And it did not take a switch of continent, or even regular experience of two different countries such as Antoine possesses (of England and of France between which countries the gun rules differ substantially – see the comments below), to convince me of this. And if I can be convinced, so can others.
We can start with those who, because they are so attracted by pro-freedom ideas about other matters, want to believe that similar ideas apply to guns. And then we can work our way outwards from there, starting with the people who want to use guns for sport, and do not see any harm in that. The point is, for them to see the good in it and to start talking about that too.
If you are arrested, and the police take your DNA to run tests on it, and if the outcome of your arrest is either that no charges were brought against you or you were brought to trial and found innocent, it has been ruled that the state can retain your DNA records indefinitely regardless.
The moral of the story is, of course, that if you do not want the state to take your DNA and hold it on record forever because you simply do not trust the state or because you have the quaint notion that your body is your own property, then do whatever it takes to not get arrested, regardless of how confident you are that you can establish your innocence subsequently.
Lord Brown said the benefits of this procedure were so manifest and the objections so threadbare that the cause of human rights would be better served by expanding the police database rather than by reducing it.
Just as it has often been said that modern fascism is most likely to appear in the guise of anti-fascism, when some establishment figure like Lord Brown start taking about ‘human rights’ it is a fair bet that ‘human rights’ about to get trampled underfoot.
My guess is that it is only a matter of time before the police in some nations start taking samples of DNA from everyone, probably starting with all children under a programme with a name like ‘The Safe Children Act’ or something similar, probably with the ostensible reason of ‘protecting your child from kidnap by Paedophiles’ or some such drivel. I mean, after all, who could possibly object to that?
The state is not your friend.
If you are arrested, and the police take your DNA to run tests on it, and if the outcome of your arrest is either that no charges were brought against you or you were brought to trial and found innocent, it has been ruled that the state can retain your DNA records indefinitely regardless.
The moral of the story is, of course, that if you do not want the state to take your DNA and hold it on record forever because you simply do not trust the state or because you have the quaint notion that your body is your own property, then do whatever it takes to not get arrested, regardless of how confident you are that you can establish your innocence subsequently.
Lord Brown said the benefits of this procedure were so manifest and the objections so threadbare that the cause of human rights would be better served by expanding the police database rather than by reducing it.
Just as it has often been said that modern fascism is most likely to appear in the guise of anti-fascism, when some establishment figure like Lord Brown start taking about ‘human rights’ it is a fair bet that ‘human rights’ about to get trampled underfoot.
My guess is that it is only a matter of time before the police in some nations start taking samples of DNA from everyone, probably starting with all children under a programme with a name like ‘The Safe Children Act’ or something similar, probably with the ostensible reason of ‘protecting your child from kidnap by Paedophiles’ or some such drivel. I mean, after all, who could possibly object to that?
The state is not your friend.
“Why would someone attack this lovely elderly couple?” asks the front page headline in the Daily Telegraph. James and Joan Briton, both in their 80s were stabbed to death attempting to defend their home from a man believed to be Mark Hobson. Hobson, aged 34, is on the run, suspected of sexually assaulting and murdering twin sisters (one of whom was his girlfriend).
The question may be rhetorical but the answer is not.
Mr and Mrs Briton, of Strensall near York, were murdered because their attacker knew he could get away with it. Armed with a knife there was no possibility that the intruder could face anything more threatening than a lawyer offering him compensation for injury if his victims used household implements to defend themselves with.
Police advice is to “not approach Hobson”. I am puzzled as to quite how this advice is relevant to an intruder who bursts into one’s home.
Meanwhile two carjackers who killed a man are sentenced to seven and a half years each. With ‘good behaviour’ they will no doubt be released in three years, minus any time spent on remand.
I note that Hobson and the carjackers are all whites, in case anyone is imagining that ‘criminal underclass scum’ has any ethnic minority connotations.
One of the less trumpeted reforms of the European Union, brought about by the increase in the number of member states in May this year, is the reduction of British European Commissioners from two to one.
The news that arch-urophile Peter Mandelson is to replace both Neil Kinnock and Chris Patten gives me mixed feelings.
On the one hand there will be even less chance of dissent from the urophile orthodoxy. On the other hand one can hardly be too sad at the removal of Messrs Kinnock and Patten and their replacement by only one bureaucrat.
So what else is in the small print that somehow failed to get reported?
Yes folks, this is a quiet Friday and it is Strange Photographs by Brian time.
This time, what we have is a fake Thunderbird rocket, which has been temporarily installed in Trafalgar Square in honour of the new Thunderbirds movie, which opens in London around now. I took the photos yesterday.
There have been all kinds of ideas floating around about what objects to put in Trafalgar Square, next to Nelson, and (I think) Havelock, and the lions. I think this is one of the better ones.
Here is the general context, which means lots of tourists clambering about on the lions and photographing one another:
Here is the one where the rocket is dwarfed by an earlier and more famous erection:
Here it is looking a bit like a rival church. What this also shows is that actually not much attention was being paid to the thing, because it is actually rather small:
And here is the Samizdata friendly shot:
Apparently quite a few of the scenes in the movie are set in London, and feature many of London’s famous landmarks, old and new, including the new local politician hutch that London has just recently had inflicted upon it.
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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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