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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The Home Office is to publish a consultation paper to help gauge how much electronic invasion of privacy the public is willing to accept.
This is a second attempt at a code of practice for controversial snooping laws, the first draft code was shelved by the government after causing outrage among privacy advocates who protested against allowing
a broad range of government agencies, including all local authorities, the NHS, the Postal Services Commission and the Food Standards Agency, to demand the communications records of Internet and telephone users.
Home Office officials insist that the new consultantion document to be published early this year will be placed in the public domain and show the totality of how data is accessed. All departments responsible for authorities accessing communications data are being asked for help to make sure the paper properly reflects what is being done and by whom.
I bet you anything that the ‘whom’ will be faceless government departments with names George Orwell would be proud of.
The state is not your friend
“A convoy of anti-war activists, likely to include dozens of British volunteers, will leave London next month to act as human shields protecting strategic sites in Iraq.”
Oh please not again.
– Salam Pax
I am back in the warm embrace of the West – the weather being considerably warmer in London than in Bratislava.  I shall write more about my ‘adventures’ abroad, suffice to say that towards the end of my trip I was genuinely looking forward to coming back home.
The politics and the public life in Eastern European countries usually make me appreciate the subtlety(!) of British politics, but my first encounter with the news in Britain quickly dispelled any reluctant appreciation of developed western democracy. The most upsetting development is the tax rises awaiting the British taxpayers in 2003 or as Francis Elliott of the Sunday Telegraph calls it, a ‘triple whammy’, which could add up to as much as £1,200 per family:
- A one per cent rise in National Insurance
- An average seven per cent rise in council tax
- Congestion charges in major cities
According to the same article, taxes are rising more steeply in Britain than in any other European country, while in America, the tax burden has fallen in recent years by 0.7 percent to 29.8 percent.
As Maurice Fitzpatrick of Tenon, a national accountancy firm puts it:
“This is the year that Labour will break cover as tax-raisers. People will feel a direct impact for the first time. In the past, the Government has been chipping away at the margins. This time, it will be a straightforward assault.”
I suppose Labour has no need to fear the opposition anymore, as the Tories oscillate between moribund and ridiculous. Their feeble and seriously confused proposals to reduce public spending by ‘saving’ money confirm just how clueless the Conservatives in Britain are:
“It’s too early to say how much [public spending can be reduced], but it could be up to 20 per cent. There is waste going on all over the place. It’s completely ridiculous. Everywhere there is a massive spraying of money, without it actually delivering anything.”
Shock, horror, Mr Flight. And you are going to sort it out how exactly? By setting up commitees of advisors to find ways of simplifying the tax system, and by providing government support for company directors who set up employee share schemes as a way of promoting ‘democractic capitalism’!?
Oh, and first let your comrades know, because they were very surprised to hear about this.
“We had a memo about this in November but since then, nothing. When I heard about it on the radio you could say I was more than a little surprised.”
Watching the Labour government unmask itself and the Conservative Party to hasten its demise, I wonder how much longer it will take for a decent opposition to emerge. Not that I put much hope into any opposition arising within the existing political meta-context or know what would make an opposition ‘decent’ under the circumstances. Any ideas?
Today I shall be leaving the wet and mouldy Albion for a snowy and frosty Mittel Europa. This means much lower temperatures but also fur coats, Christmas markets, hot mead, mulled wine, slivovica and lots of lovely, lovely traditional Christmas food. Provided I can heave myself away from all that feasting, I shall post about whatever catches my meta-contextual eye. Or may be I’ll just write about anything that still makes sense after drinking the fierce regional spirits.
I shall return to celebrate the New Year in London with the rest of the Samizdatistas.
Few weeks ago I blogged about China’s pressure on Hong Kong to pass an anti-subversion law. According to the law, people found guilty of acts of treason, sedition, secession from, or subversion of, the mainland government could be imprisoned for life under the new law. Also, concepts like “state secrets” and “national security” in the law are too vague, leaving them open to abuse.This may be – and I’d certainly argue that it will be – exploited by authorities in Beijing and Hong Kong against anyone they dislike in the former British colony, promised a high degree of autonomy when it was handed back to China in 1997.
Tens of thousands of Hong Kong people (march organisers say 50,000) have taken part in one of the territory’s biggest marches in years, denouncing the plans they fear will erode freedom and civil liberties. As many as 100 civil and religious groups joined in the march, including the Falun Gong spiritual movement, which is banned in China.
Mr Wong, a marcher says: “This law will threaten the rights of many, many people in Hong Kong, how can I not protest?”
Quite. I wonder what John Smith or Joe Bloggs would say…
The French economy is deteriorating, so much so, that the French themselves admit that the growth of 0.2% between July-September 2002 is worse than expected, according to Nicolas Claquin, economist at CCF bank.
“We can expect [the weakness] to continue at least until the start of 2003, confirming our forecast of gross domestic product growth of 1.4% next year. The government’s growth target (2.5%) for 2003 is too high.”
So far not a surprise deserving a mention on this blog – it is the ability of the French to manage an arrogant spin of their worsening economic situation that is astounding:
“The figure confirms that France is not immune from the slowdown affecting our European partners and the United States.”
Perhaps Mr Cavalier, a Credit Lyonnais eurozone economist, failed to notice that despite the other countries’ economic problems the French economy is doing still worse than Germany and Italy in the last quarter and far worse than the UK and the US.
Jul-Sep 2002
UK +0.8%
Germany +0.3%
Italy +0.3%
France +0.2%
US +1.3
But, of course, let’s blame it all on the Americans.
It was futile to argue with politicians, I realized, to try to persuade them that your scepticism concerning their views might be well founded. Politicians developed habits of self-justification and certitude which were immune to logic or emotion: their rhetoric was like a blanket which they wrapped around themselves to keep out the bracing air of dissent.
– Princess Catherine, in Aztec Century by Christopher Evans
According to Carlton Vogt unless you have been living in a cave, you’re aware of the Pentagon’s Total Information Awareness (TIA) programme. My cave has an internet connection so I can blog about it eventually. Although the news about it has already been round the blogosphere I liked Mr Vogt’s article.
The goal of TIA is to accumulate every bit of transactional online data worldwide and use data mining techniques to provide intelligence information. This means TIA will give the Pentagon access to your credit card data, school records, medical information, travel history, church affiliation, gun ownership, ammunition purchases, library records, video rentals, you name it: “This will all be collected into a database, the purpose of which is ostensibly to fight terrorism, but which will present a massive opportunity for government abuse. There comes a point in almost every science fiction “B” movie where someone suggests that the new invention can be beneficial, but will be dangerous if “it falls into the wrong hands.”
The problem is that this technology has not only fallen into the wrong hands, it was conceived by “the wrong hands.” The chief architect of this new data gathering and mining scheme is none other than John Poindexter: “Those who are old enough will remember him from the arms-for-hostages scandal, in which many of the arms currently threatening us in the Middle East were illegally traded to Iran by the Reagan administration.
Poindexter subsequently was convicted of several felonies, including conspiracy, perjury, and obstruction of justice. The convictions were later overturned on a technicality. The disgraced former admiral re-entered public life this year as a civilian Pentagon employee.”
InfoWorld deals mainly with computer and technology related news or issues. It was most encouraging to read the following analysis by one of the senior editors in his regular column Ethics Matters: “We are in the midst of vast fundamental changes in the body of rights, legal and moral, that we have taken for granted for so long. I am constantly amazed at how passively most people have accepted these changes, which will affect the way we live and work. It is a dangerous path on which false beginnings and missteps along the way can end in disaster.
If we scroll down to the bottom line, we find that the TIA project places too much information on too many people into the hands of too few people with too little oversight. It portends disaster.
…We have the opportunity to put the brakes on here before the situation becomes that grave. Perhaps it’s time for people to shake off their post-9/11 stupor and find out what mischief is being done under the guise of fighting terrorism. You may not like what you see.”
Absolutely. The state is not your friend.
A young black man can be murdered by a gang of white thugs at a bus stop1. The result? Senior politicians and police in front of the cameras; public inquiries; new phrases such as ‘institutional racism’; sweeping reforms; a trust set up to help others from ‘similarly disadvantaged backgrounds’. A young white man gets murdered by a gang of four black men and a black woman in Lewisham, South East London; it makes a one-inch high column at the bottom of page two. Why?
– Ian Wells, London E18, today in readers’ comments section of Metro newspaper (a daily distributed for free on the London Underground).
1 = Reference to the murder of Stephen Lawrence.
Alice Bachini takes on the post-war modern(ist) architecture and a BBC Open University educational programme in one sweeping and scathing masterblog:
“But alas, somehow, the Great Vision of Modernism went wrong. Mr Doodah is now the only person living in the enormous freezing-cold ‘penthouses’ perched atop the huge ‘mega-centre’ designed for shops and offices that inexplicably refused to co-operate with his vision and move to DumDoodle in the darkest Hebridean Countryside. “It was designed as a Centre For Living,” he explained, “a complete, all-in-one place which you would never have to leave again! And look,” he says. “What do we have now instead of my miraculous ideas? Shopping malls. Who wants shopping malls, might I ask you? Honestly!” and he shook his head in disbelief and delusion.”
[…]
“And there we have it: modernism. Yet another tragic victim of the international capitalist conspiracy.
The End. A BBC Educational Production for the Open University.”
I have been wondering recently why all the Al-Qaeda attacks happen in countries that would be at the bottom of the list of expected targets for a terrorist group with their agenda. They aim at American or Israeli targets but that does not explain the exotic selection of places they chose to do so. Here is a list of suspected Al-Qaeda attacks, by no means exhaustive:
- Djerba, Tunisia, 9th March – A truck explodes near the El Ghriba synangogue, killing 14
- Rishon Letzion, Israel, 11th April – a suicide bomber kills 16 and wounds 60 at a billiard hall
- Karachi, Pakistan, 14th June – suspected suicide bomber kills 14 outside Sheraton hotel and a car bomb outside the US consulate explodes later killing 11 and injuring 45
- Aden, Yemen, 6th October – an explosion of the French tanker Limburg kills a crew member
- Bali, Indonesia, 12th October – bombs explode outside the Sari Club disco at Kuta Beach resort killing 185 people and injuring hundreds more. A third bomb explodes near the US consulate in Sanur, no-one is hurt.
- Zamboanga, Philippines, 17th October 2002 – two bombs detonated at a shopping center leaving 6 people dead and 144 injured.
- Mombasa, Kenya – 28th November – a vehicle crashes into the lobby of the Paradise Hotel and together with a second device explodes, 14 killed and 80 injured. Two Stinger missiles are fired at an Israeli passenger jet at it takes off from Mombasa airport, narrowly missing 260 passengers.
These are not obvious terrorist destinations. One explanation is that the developed Western country have higher security, which makes it more difficult to carry out same style of attacks. I very much doubt that, as the IRA used to manage just fine disrupting life in London and I am not aware of any security measures that would make terrorist attacks impossible.
Any more theories about why the strange collection of targets? It is the ones that are missing from the list that puzzle me…
From being the envy of the world, the British armed forces are in danger of becoming merely average: a cut-price, camouflaged UNICEF…
My sources tell me that this is an accurate account of what’s going on in the British Army at the moment. Or more precisely, how the New Labour government has been undermining one of the most respected and professional British institutions:
The British military and New Labour are politically and philosophically polar opposites. The government has made these differences even more acute by spending much of the last few years forcing soldiers to adopt a work ethic more in line with commerce than with combat. Who Dares Wins has been replaced by Health and Safety. The government believes that it has a duty to look after soldiers by protecting their ‘rights’, but this approach to soldiering seriously undermines the ability of the men and women of the armed forces to get on with a difficult and dangerous job.
[…]
The government’s obsession with political correctness has been applied to the military with such relish that at times it seems almost insane. I have lost count of the number of forms I have had to fill in giving details of my ethnic origin. These forms used to be anonymous, but the last one I had to complete carried my name, rank and service number. Perhaps this was a reaction to an earlier (anonymous) form, which had revealed that in our all-male unit there was a huge number of Bangladeshi single mothers!
[…]
Health-and-safety inspectors are blamed for recommending that chlorine be introduced into the underwater tunnel, in case some poor Commando picks up a bit of dysentery or a sore throat as a result of wading through dirty water. The steep ravines worn into the slopes that recruits had to run up and down at various points on the seven-mile course were also contrary to all sorts of well-meaning legislation. The recommendation was for proper steps and handrails to be installed — just like the ones you find in the mountains of Afghanistan or the wadis of Iraq.
The armed forces in the UK are currently so over-streched that their management amounts to a permanent crisis-management. The professionalism and high quality of the British army currently rests on the dedication of its officers. Let’s face it, they are not there for the money and they don’t get to shoot much these days either. The British military doesn’t lobby, speak out, point out the ignorance of the current government of military matters (which has no limits as this is the first government where nobody has a direct military experience) or do anything that would undermine its strong ethos as a ‘civilian’ army. Her Majesty the Queen, a civilian, is head of the Navy, Army and Air Force of Britain.
Perhaps they should.
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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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