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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Didn’t see that one coming

· Activism · Arts & Entertainment

Actorist Susan Sarandon is in negotiations to play Cindy Sheehan in an upcoming telemovie portraying the latter’s life.

(Via Drudge)

March 20th, 2006 | 36 comments - (Comments are closed)

Europe’s Tiananmen Square?

· Activism · Central & Eastern Europe

As expected, the electoral results from Belarus were a load of cobblers. Now the unexpected protests have started, with an estimated 5,000 brave protestors supporting the opposition candidate, Milinkevich, and declaring the elction null and void.

Thousands of protesters thronged the main square of the Belarusian capital on Sunday in defiance of a government ban, refusing to recognize a presidential vote that appeared all but certain to give the iron-fisted incumbent a third term.

The crowd hooted when a large video screen broadcast a live statement from the Central Election Commission chief, who announced results that showed President Alexander Lukashenko headed toward overwhelming victory in Sunday’s vote.

The protesters chanted “Long Live Belarus!” and the name of the main opposition candidate, Alexander Milinkevich. Some waved a national flag that Lukashenko banned in favor of a Soviet-style replacement, while others waved European Union flags. Milinkevich arrived at Oktyabrskaya square later.

These are the results from the election thief:

The elections chief, Lidia Yermoshina, said Lukashenko had won 89 percent of the vote, according to returns from nearly one-fifth of polling districts. The results virtually guaranteed a third term for the authoritarian leader who has ruled the republic since 1994.

“Lukashenko cannot have won 80 percent!” he said, referring to exit polls conducted by two groups the opposition says are loyal to the government and released just hours after voting began that projected he would win more than 80 percent of the vote.

“Cannot! Cannot! Cannot!” the crowd chanted.

Let us remember that Lukashenko has no qualms about viewing all of these protestors as terrorists. Russia will stand idly by, with the satisfied smile of Reynaud, and the EU will wring its hands, a pity it isn’t its own bloody neck!

However, I am quite pessimistic about the outcome. Lukashenko has the support of stagnation amongst the majority of the population. Only those whose future hopes have vanished under this regime will be in the square tonight.

Now we wait for Lukashenko’s move…frostbite or tanks?

March 19th, 2006 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)

Our Velvet Tyranny

· Civil liberty, Law & Regulation · UK affairs

The media has minutely examined the financial affairs of the Labour Party, offsetting the silence of potential Tory hypocrisy. Yet, this is less than not very important. The man who will not contest the next election has low approval ratings and the party that his successor will battle has lost their lead in the polls. Such are the dangers of binding yourself too closely to your enemy.

The real dangers lie in the rapid erosion of our civil liberties. A message that is always worth repeating and Henry Porter in the Observer does it better than I ever could:

You may have noticed the vaguely menacing tone of recent government advertising campaigns. Here is a current example: ‘If you know a business that isn’t registered for tax, call the Revenue or HM Customs – no names needed.’ Another says: ‘Technology has made it easier to identify benefit cheats.’

Whether the campaign is about rape, TV licences or filling in your tax form, there is always a we-know-where-you-live edge to the message, a sense that this government is dividing the nation into suspects and informers.

The article is a succinct reminder of all the arguments that need to be brought to bear to offset ID cards and the database, open to all and sundry. We must remember that only totalitarian states abolish privacy: whether they are of the soft or hard variant. In Britain, this will partially be achieved by linking ID cards to the ‘chip and pin’ systems that provide universal verification for card transactions.

You will need the card when you receive prescription drugs, when you withdraw a relatively small amount of money from a bank, check into hospital, get your car unclamped, apply for a fishing licence, buy a round of drinks (if you need to prove you’re over 18), set up an internet account, fix a residents’ parking permit or take out insurance.

Every time that card is swiped, the central database logs the transaction so that an accurate plot of your life is drawn. The state will know everything that it needs to know; so will big corporations, the police, the Inland Revenue, HM Customs, MI5 and any damned official or commercial busybody that wants access to your life. The government and Home Office have presented this as an incidental benefit, but it is at the heart of their purpose.

Last week, Andrew Burnham, a junior minister at the Home Office, confirmed the anonymous email by admitting that the ID card scheme would now include chip-and-pin technology because it would be a cheaper way of checking each person’s identity. The sophisticated technology on which this bill was sold will cost too much to operate, with millions of checks being made every week.

The British state has one objective: Without the ID Card, you will have no life.

March 19th, 2006 | 32 comments - (Comments are closed)

The UK loans-for-peerages scandal

· UK affairs

This does not look good for ol’ big ears, does it?

A “cash-for-favours” row threatening Prime Minister Tony Blair has sent his approval rating to its lowest level since he come to power in 1997, according to a poll published on Sunday. The controversy erupted this month when it was disclosed that several wealthy businessmen were nominated for seats in the House of Lords after lending large sums of money to the Labour Party

It is becoming harder and harder to figure out the difference between Blair and the sort of operators who held sway in the Prime Ministerial offices of Italy, Japan and parts of Latin America for much of the last 100 years.

I repeat what I said a couple of days back: I predict Blair will be out of Downing Street in 12 months from now. This stuff is starting to pile on him with increasing weight.

March 19th, 2006 | 52 comments - (Comments are closed)

Samizdata quote of the day

· Arts & Entertainment · Slogans & Quotations

“This film cost $31 million. With that kind of money I could have invaded some country.”

Clint Eastwood. I wonder what particular country he had in mind.

March 19th, 2006 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)

Murdoch sees power shift to new media

· Media & Journalism

At a recent speech, Rupert Murdoch noted:

“It is difficult, indeed dangerous, to underestimate the huge changes this revolution will bring or the power of developing technologies to build and destroy — not just companies but whole countries,” said Murdoch, in a speech for the Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers.

He mentioned bloggers as one of those forces so I guess we are doing something right.

March 19th, 2006 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)

Falcon launch expected within days

· Aerospace & Astronautics

According to Elon Musk:

“Falcon 1 has been removed from its hangar and erected on the launch pad. All systems are currently go for a static fire on March 17 or 18, followed by a launch between March 20 and 25.”

My fingers are crossed as a successful first launch would be a wonderful thing… but then, how often does that happen in rocketry?

PS: You can see Elon at the 25th International Space Development Conference and offer him your congrats or condolences, depending…

March 19th, 2006 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)

Better than Fairtrade

· Economics, Business & Globalization

While activists call for consumers to buy Fairtrade coffee, critics – like the author of the documentary The Bitter Aftertaste – say that the achievements of the Fairtrade movement are too modest. Hostility to the movement is on the rise from right and left alike. As Reason magazine puts it:

The movement has always aroused suspicion on the right, where free traders object to its price floors and anti-globalization rhetoric. Yet critics from the left are more vocal and more angry by half; they point to unhappy farmers, duped consumers, an entrenched Fair Trade bureaucracy, and a grassroots campaign gone corporate.

It has always seemed to me that there is a better, more sustainable approach to raising living standards. That approach is to help farmers move away from just growing coffee and exporting the beans (with very little processing) to the developed world. If coffee-producing countries actually did the processing and packaging, and even stuck their own trademarks on the finished product, developing countries would be able to capture more of the value in a bag of coffee sold in shops in the high street.

When I’ve spoken to Western companies selling Fairtrade produce, they never seemed all that interested in the idea – or they though it was not feasible. So I am delighted to have found a company that actually does it: coffee grown in Peru and Costa Rica where the packaging and processing is also done there too. I went to their UK online store and bought some which I will be tasting in the office on Monday, but it strikes me as a superb way of increasing living standards. More information is here.

March 18th, 2006 | 31 comments - (Comments are closed)

Samizdata quote of the day

· Humour · Slogans & Quotations

Andrew Sullivan:

It strikes me that people with a secure sense of their own faith are often the least liable to get upset by parodies or comedies about it. Religions may deal in divine truths, but they are run by human beings. And the combination is often funny. True believers know that; and don’t care when they’re made fun of. Insecure believers – and they often need fundamentalism to keep their own souls untroubled by doubt – are the touchiest.

I am writing this in the wee island of Malta, a country which has one of the largest church attendances per head of any country in the world, from what I understand. (The Maltese have churches with the same frequency as golf courses in Florida). And yet the good-natured folk of this island strike me as taking pretty much the sort of robust attitude to their faith as Sully mentions. (Why are you blogging and not on the beach, Ed?)

And interestingly, his point applies just as forcefully to other, non-religious beliefs too. Humour can be a weapon but it is also a shield.

March 18th, 2006 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)

Bionic advance

· Health & medical · Science & Technology

This story about advances in creation of artificial limbs and muscles caught my attention:

Scientists have developed artificial, super-strength muscles which are powered by alcohol and hydrogen. And they could eventually be used to make more advanced prosthetic limbs, say researchers at University of Texas.

Writing in Science, they say these artificial muscles are 100 times more powerful than the body’s own. They said they could even be used in “exoskeletons” to give superhuman strength to certain professions such as firefighters, soldiers and astronauts.

As we ponder the flow of day-to-day news, it is easy to overlook the tremendous advances going on in fields like this. As the article mentions, applications of such medical technologies apply not just to repairing existing injuries or coping with the terrible effects of losing a limb (a sobering reality for victims of terror, car accidents, conflicts, etc), but even for perfectly healthy people looking to augment their physical strength.

The story demonstrates how blurred the boundaries now are between medical technologies that can be used to repair or heal injuries and those used to make what we have picked up in Darwin’s great lottery draw even better. The genetic fatalists will decry all this for tampering with God’s Will or whatever, but I don’t see any difference between this and say, laser surgery for the eye, or technologies to make it possible to vastly increase our hearing strength, or enhance our cognitive capacity, and so forth.

Mind you, it makes me wonder how this technology, if it really works, is going to affect sport. At the moment the sporting authorities controlling events like the Tour de France cycling event, say, or the Olympic Games, treat any form of human augmentation or performance enhancement as off-limits. I guess so long as participants agree in advance not to use such techniques, then they cannot complain if they are caught breaking the rules. But in some occupations like those mentioned in the story, such as astronauts experiencing the effects of zero-gravity environments, this sort of stuff might be a basic necessity rather than a luxury.

Meanwhile, here is an interesting story about nanotech and possible cures for blindness. And I can recommend this book by Ronald Bailey.

Makes a change from writing about Tony Blair, anyway.

March 18th, 2006 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)

What is a right for Jyllands-Posten should also be a right for CBS

· Civil liberty, Law & Regulation · North American affairs

David Holcberg of the Ayn Rand Institute makes some good points about the FCC’s proposed fines against CBS. If a Danish newspaper can establish that freedom of expression does indeed mean the right to do things that will offend some people, should that notion not also apply in the ‘Land of the Free’?

The $3.6 million in ‘indecency’ fines proposed by the FCC against CBS are an ominous attack on the freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment.

Just as the government does not fine newspapers that publish cartoons that Muslims deem indecent, it should not fine broadcasters that air shows that viewers deem indecent. Viewers are free to change the channel or turn off their TV set if they do not like what they see. They can not be forced to patronize a station they find indecent.

Moreover, it is the parents – not the government – who should be responsible for determining what their children are allowed to watch on TV.

March 17th, 2006 | 61 comments - (Comments are closed)

Spammer problems

· Administrative

Comments may be unavailable for a while as we are getting hammered by spammers and are working to adjust our defences to keep them out.

March 17th, 2006 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
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