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This senior British police officer tells the Daily Telegraph that householders should be able to use force, lethal force if necessary, to beat off burglars. Good. It may not immediately lead to a change in public policy but I get the feeling that a watershed was passed in the murder this week of City financier and Chelsea resident, John Monckton. Regular readers of this site will know that the crime was committed within a few yards of our own Perry de Havilland’s home.
I am not going to repeat all the arguments we have seen about the issue of self defence, both on this blog and in our comments section. For me it is simple – the right to life is not worth much if one cannot use the means necessary to defend it. Full stop, no ifs, buts or qualifications. What does strike me, though, is that restoring the right of self defence will also, indirectly, improve the quality of our police forces. There are still a lot of very brave, committed and smart people in the police. Such people join up not just for the nice pension but also out of a desire to put thugs behind bars and protect the public. By being turned into “the paramilitary wing of the Guardian newspaper”, as blogger David Farrer memorably put it, many good policemen and women may have been demoralised and driven out of the force.
So if we want to be able to encourage smart and good people to be coppers and restore the reputation of the boys in dark blue, then restoring the liberties and protections of our Common Law is an integral part of that goal. All good Bobbies should be cheering on the rights of self defence.
It has now been twenty years since the release of chemicals at a Union Carbide plant in the Indian city of Bhopal killed thousands of people, and today I heard that Dow (which took over Union Carbide three years ago) has announced an multi billion aid package.
With all the anti-American and anti-big business stuff in the media it is hard to get at the facts of the case. But the following are the facts as I understand them. If I am mistaken I am open to correction. I have no great love for the business model of ownerless corporations (or rather enterprises where most of the shares are owed by institutions), but some counter balance to the tide of abuse in the media seems to be in order.
Union Carbide built the plant because of the taxes on imports then in place in India, it did not build the plant in order to avoid following American safety standards of production.
Due to the regulations of the “Permit Raj” the plant was under the control of an Indian subsidiary of Union Carbide and the American parent company had little control over day to day operation of the plant.
The local State government went back on promises not to allow people to squat near to the plant – this may have increased casualties.
A Union Carbide investigation of the terrible incident reported that it may have been caused by sabotage and that the person responsible for the sabotage may have been a local employee (not an American at all).
Union Carbide paid, in full, the damages awarded by an Indian court.
Union Carbide officials have tried to avoid visiting the site because when the President of the company did so he was arrested, and was only able to return the United States by ‘skipping bail’. It was fear, not cruelty, that kept them away.
After the terrible incident the local State government took over the site and this site is still in a terrible state to this day. It is in the interests of local politicians and officials to blame ‘American big business’ in order to cover up their own failure to clean up the site in the many years they have controlled it.
I repeat that I am open to correction on any of the above. It would not greatly surprise me if Union Carbide were to blame (as I have said I am not a great lover of ownerless corps), but that is not the situation as I understand it.
I was trawling through an ancient b3ta.com newsletter, as you do, earlier in the week, and came across these profundities. But since the profundities concern cats, I saved them until today, Friday being catblogging day, or so I seem to recall reading somewhere. Anyway, this is what b3ta.com says, so profoundly:
We can’t imagine anything worse than being allergic to cats – it’d be like having an allergy to life itself. However, help is at hand for sufferers. Boffins are busy meddling with nature to create a moggy that won’t provoke an allergic reaction, and the first kittens are due in 2007. A snip at just $3500. BTW: When people claim they’re allergic to cat fur, what they mean is that they’re allergic to cat urine, cat skin or cat saliva that’s become airborne by being secreted on the fur.
And b3ta.com then supply this link to allerca. Says allerca at the top of its website:
WELCOME TO ALLERCA. ALLERCA is working to produce the world’s first hypoallergenic cats. These cats will allow some of the millions of people allergic to cats to enjoy the love and companionship of a household pet without suffering from allergy symptoms.
If you obsess only about the doings of politicians, you are liable to miss good news stories like that. Name me one politician who ever did anything as splendid as inventing a non-allergic-type cat. Actually, do not name any such politicians, because there may have been one or two. But you get my point.
Boffins meddling with nature, enough to make you purr, eh? Remind me to return to this topic in 2007, because strictly speaking it has not yet been done.
My apologies to all those readers of samizdata.net who are allergic to catblogging. Also, it seems that I am about six weeks late with this happy announcement. But, it is the kind of thing you can miss, so never mind about that.
Instapundit supplies two interesting (at first I thought that was about bloggers deep under the earth) recent links (among the usual zillion other interesting links), which in their different ways both illustrate how difficult it is being a Big Business person these days.
The first is to this Wall Street Journal piece, about how big business is now using the buzz on the Internet, blogs, etc., to find out what people really thing of their latest products.
People who rave online about their favorite new gadget – or gripe about the products they hate – are turning heads in the business world.
The growing popularity of blogs and other online forums has prompted companies to pay more attention to what is being said about them on the Internet, and has given rise to a new kind of market research aimed at finding useful information in the sea of online chatter.
For more than a year, car-maker Volkswagen AG has used a service by Techdirt, Foster City, Calif., to find out which new technologies are generating the most buzz online, with the aim of integrating some of them in new automobiles. “I think [Web sites] are very important as a source of unfiltered information, but there’s too much information out there already. Frankly, we don’t have time to keep track of all these things,” says Daniel Rosario, a senior engineer in Volkswagen’s electronics research lab in Silicon Valley.
There is no link to Techdirt in the piece, but presumably they mean these guys. → Continue reading: Buzz
I am confused (as Americans often say when they are about to be nasty in a very unconfused way – but I really am rather confused) by this BBC report about a scheme to make spammers wish that their parents had been further into birth control than they were, at about the time when they, the spammers, were actually born.
Here is the first paragraph:
A plan to bump up the bandwidth bills of spammers seems to be getting out of control.
But from what I can grasp of the rest of the article, what the BBC calls “getting out of control” is what the rest of use would describe as “working extremely well”.
Earlier this week Lycos Europe released a screensaver that bombards spam websites with data to try to increase the cost of running such sites.
But…
…which seems an odd word to use here. I would have gone with “And”…
…analysis shows that, in some cases, spam websites are being completely overwhelmed by the traffic being directed their way.
As that Sergeant Major (played by Windsor Davies) in It Ain’t Half Hot Mum used to say; “Oh dear. How tragic.”
But monitoring firm Netcraft has analysed response times for three of the sites the screensaver targets and has found that the campaign is being too successful.
What was that? Too successful?
Two of the sites being bombarded by data have been completely knocked offline. One other site has been responding to requests only intermittently as it struggles to cope with the traffic the screensaver is pointing its way.
Too successful. Too successful!!! Sounds like for once the punishment has fitted the crime perfectly.
But yes.
The campaign has come under fire from some corners of the web.
Many discussion groups have said that it set a dangerous precedent and could incite vigilantism.
“If you do manage to swamp the spammers then you set yourself up for more attacks in return,” said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at anti-virus firm Sophos.
Which, I suppose, would make this Cluley man a Sophist, twice over. This is like saying that if you use force against a burglar, he might get angry and burgle you even more ferociously in the future. As he might, I suppose. Best roll over and surrender. But I reckon that Cluley does not understand economics. I mean, if you were a spamster, would you make a point of picking a fight with people clever enough to have swamped your entire site?
This corner of the web (the corner that consists of me) is extremely attracted by the whole idea of what Lycos is doing here, and wonders what the downside of it is, if any. This corner of the web is in favour of what other corners of the web call “vigilantism”. To this corner of the web, this all sounds absolutely splendid.
But is this corner of the web missing something? What does this discussion group think?
The only real problem in what Lycos is doing seems, to this corner of the web, to be that the state, in all its various geographical manifestations, is minded to make it illegal. What is that thing that Perry keeps saying?
But so what? Even if this process is declared illegal, something resembling it could still proceed, could it not? If enough people wanted that? No? But at this point I really am rather confused.
Time for some good news, in the form of a classic piece of techno-ingenuity that looks like turning a classic problem into a classic solution.
You know how, when you take photos with your cheap digital camera (everyone has cheap digital cameras nowadays), and when you use flash (everyone uses flash), you get that horrible dark shadow behind and to one side (depending on exactly where the flash thingy is situated next to the camera lens). A problem, right? I think so. When I take digital photos, I am prepared to endure agonies of bad lighting and blurriness rather than resort to flash and its pictorial indignities.
But this guy has turned this problem into a solution. Solid shapes give you annoying little black lines do they? So why not, he said to himself, have four flash guns, all around the lens, not just one, and that way, get yourself black lines everywhere, wherever anything sticks out?
The multi-flash camera captures real life images and renders them in a non-photorealistic line-form. …
So what use is that? A lot, it turns out.
The multi-flash camera’s non-photorealistic images look like line drawings, but have an advantage over hand made line drawings for they are able [to] depict real-world scenes with precision and, most importanly, speed impossible for the human eye/hand. …
Think of all those instructions manuals where, in order to explain things properly, they cannot use photos, because photos are not clear enough, and must instead resort to laboriously created line drawings. Well, this gadget creates line drawings like that automatically.
Multi-flash imaging promises to facilitate and pioneer complicated rendering of mechanical objects, plants, or internal anatomical parts. Because of its ability to detect depth discontinuities, it may render shapes that would otherwise be difficult to perceive. For instance, a car engine could easily be captured in a non-photorealistic image and then superimposed over an actual photograph of the engine resulting in a superior manual illustration (see example below). Alternatively, a skeleton with complex network of white bones could be efficiently reproduced for instructional medical visualization. Additionally, an endoscopic camera enhanced with the multi-flash technology promises to enhance internal anatomical visualization for researchers and medical doctors.
I wonder if the kind of cheap digital cameras you can now buy for $200 will soon have this kind of facility. Personally, I look forward to a time when cheap digital cameras have far more, and more flexible, flash devices on them than they have now. My first digital camera had only one flash device of course, but it was such that I could take pictures from one direction and point the flash at the object of my attentions from a quite different direction. Too bad it never worked properly. You can get flash devices for a digital camera like this now, but they cost far more than I care to pay. If this new device draws attention to the good things that digital flash can do, that might change.
Which is all rather incidental. My main point here is: what a brilliant idea.
UPDATE: By the way, as a commenter reminded me by asking about this, I should have said that this camera is a whole lot better than anything Photoshop can do along these … lines! (Ha!) Follow the second link above, scroll down a bit, and you come to a set of six pictures. These show this difference very clearly, and it is all the difference.
What she said.
What she (the Telegraph‘s Janet Daley) started by saying was what they did in New York to bash the crime numbers down to a state bordering on civilisation from a state not bordering on barbarism. And then she turns her attention to the very contrasting state of affairs that still pertains in London, as we here hardly need reminding.
You will have noticed that this is precisely the opposite of what is happening here. Try ringing the police to tell them about an act of vandalism that is going on before your eyes and you will be treated with scarcely concealed ridicule: we’ve got more important things to worry about than some kids smashing up a building site. Never mind that the kids who have got away with that are likely to conclude that they can get away with pretty much anything.
Now New Yorkers have their city back and we are losing ours. …
I have a suggestion.
The politicos are cranking up this London Olympic bid. Well, all those of us who care more about people getting murdered than we do about people running marathons should offer the Olympiacs a deal. You can have your damned games if, by the time they come here, you have got on top of London’s crime numbers. If, on the other hand, you obsess about the Olympics and regard harping on about murder as a mere distraction, then we should all flood the internet with “London: World Capital of Crime – Olympians Do Not Come Here – You Will All Be Murdered” propaganda. “London Welcomes The Olympians” – “Now Hand Over Your Wallet Or Die”, etc.
Could some computer graphics genius perhaps do something with those Olympic ring things to turn them into a piece of anti-crime anti-the-political-causes-of-crime propaganda? Slosh some blood on them, perhaps, or make a couple of the rings into the front end of a double-barrelled shotgun.
The good thing about this arrangement is that I believe that it would work spontaneously. No one would have to be in charge of anything. But, if any of the people who do think that they are in charge of the Olympic bid tell us that we are being unpatriotic if we go on about crime in London instead of ignoring it and suffering in silence, they will be spontaneously attacked, and in a way that will really hurt them, with globally circulated (especially in Paris of course) bad news about what an appallingly unsuitable city London would be to hold these stupid games. Shut up, they will say. And the reply will be: no. Either you help us, or we screw you. That will be our message to them. And I think, after they have had a taste of it, that it might prove rather persuasive.
Which means that it is possible is that the Olympiacs might actually be recruited as allies in the campaign sketched out so vigorously by Janet Daley. Which means that something along the lines she says might – quite soon actually – start being done.
If London did do a New York with its criminal arrangements, as a result of the Olympics coming here, I for one could easily put up with a few weeks of Olympiac madness.
Like many libertarians I often attack the BBC. I doubt that it is actually more statist in the opinions it supports than ITV and C4, or, perhaps, than ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN in the United States – but with the licence fee (the tax on television owners that goes to the BBC) it hurts more to experience the endless blather about Welfare State spending being the ultimate good and the solution to every problem being another government regulation.
However, the BBC does sometimes get things right. Yesterday, when reporting yet another Chinese coal mine accident, the BBC reporter said “and this makes 7,000 deaths over the last year in the state owned Chinese coal mining industry” and pointed out that there were claims that the Chinese government had cut corners on safety in order to boost production (shades of Stalin’s “war on the limiters”).
In reporting the large numbers of deaths (i.e. that the accident was not an isolated incident) and that the industry was state owned (i.e. that the deaths were not caused by wicked businessmen), the BBC showed a depth of reporting and a fairness that should be praised.
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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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