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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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After nearly a decade in which many Big Government restrictions have been lifted from Ireland, helping turn it into the Celtic Tiger, it seems Big G is back again.
Irish pub landlords will now be fined up to thousands of pounds if they allow their customers to become drunk (no, I’m not kidding). Happy hours are also banned, when landlords can decide what prices to charge for their drinks, at any particular time of day.
This should raise another nice little line of regulation for another bunch of twerpish bureaucrats to supervise, rather than working for a living, interfering once again in the market trade process of exchanged goods.
Pub landlords will also be deemed responsible for anyone who is drunk, after they have left their premises. Which is nice. It seems even Ireland, for millennia a land of little or no government, is getting Big G back with a vengeance.
If we dug a little further would you suspect the EU is under this somewhere? I wonder…
Who would have thought it? One of the main nutrition-industry opponents of the Atkins diet has had some of her research sponsored by the flour industry. Remarkable.
They really don’t like it up ’em, do they?, these nutritionists, who for years have been ordering us all to eat more low-fat (i.e. high carbohydrate) foods. And the Atkins diet is the bayonet up the bum they all secretly dread. For an entire industry of do-gooders, sponsored by the NHS and other tax-funded bodies, have made a fabulous living in the UK over the last two decades by sticking their noses into the things we eat, the fluids we drink, and the way we live.
And the news they don’t want anyone to hear is that it may be their advice, which has been causing all of the increasing obesity, because of their obsession with low-fat food. Manufacturers pack out these products with sugar, rice, and all the corn-syrup they can get their hands on. These overwhelm the poor old insulin-creating Islets of Langerhans, in the pancreas; the effects of this, according to Dr Atkins, are that we pile on weight and become addicted to carbs (sweets, beer, etc).
As well as causing obesity, particularly amongst children, the nutrition industry may also have created the huge rise in that dreadful silent killer disease, diabetes.
It’s not a pretty picture. And neither was I. Just after Christmas this year I topped 17st and 10lbs, and I was exhibiting what doctors call a pre-diabetic tendency (e.g. chain-eating packets of sweets). By God, that was some stomach, and in Winston Churchill’s famous phrase, that was some neck. But now, because of the late Dr Atkins, I’m 16st and 1lb. I was even better than this, at 15st 10lbs, but a recent reversion to ‘normal’ carb-loaded eating sent me back over the dreaded 16st barrier. So it’s back to Atkins, starting today, till we hit my fighting weight of 14st, though I’ll probably have some carb-relapses on the way, involving lager and curry, and it may take me a while.
So, to any anti-Atkins nutritionist, is it better I be nearly 18st, pre-diabetic, under blood pressure strain, and eating carb-laden low fat snacks, or 16st, not eating carbs, and a with significantly decreased obesity-related health risk? Hmmm…it takes me about 3.9 nanoseconds to work that one out. → Continue reading: Anti-Atkins do-gooder working for the flour industry
With Mr Schwarzenegger throwing his hat into the ring of the California Governorship, I thought it was my aspiring libertarian duty to the spirit of freedom, to take in the Austrian candidate’s latest mega-movie, Terminator 3, Rise of the Machines. So I beat a warm and humid trail from a jet-engine air-conditioned hotel in the salubrious Euston area of London, to the fragrant Leicester Square, home to a million and one interesting smells emanating from the great hoi polloi of old London Town.
I managed to scramble about the last ticket sold, for the early evening performance at the Odeon cinema, and only managed to sit down and switch off my mobile phone ten seconds before the opening credits began.
So, first impressions? If there’s a Terminator 4, I’ll be back. (Come on, we’ve got to get these things out of the way when reviewing Arnie films. I’ll try to get all the others in as soon as I can, to ease the pain.)
Second impressions? To hell with what the literati London critics said about this film. I’m a lowbrow and I need regular jolts of science-fiction-style entertainment to get me through this rollercoaster we know as life. And Arnie films almost always do the trick (except for Twins, of course.)
In Terminator 3, Arnold once again delivers the goods. Can he really be 56 years old? I hope I have pectorals like that when I’m 56. Hell, I wish I’d had pectorals like that when I was 23. → Continue reading: Terminator 3, Rise of the Machines
And so, as Jack Bauer ends his ordeal without any sleep, any trips to the bathroom, or any visible form of food other than sporadic liquid snacks sucked at the wheel of the latest stolen car (Sorry Sir, we have to take your vehicle), I wonder to myself…
What the heck am I going to do on Sunday nights, for the next six months?
Is 24 the only program currently on television, which is in any way worth coming home to watch, of an evening? And now it’s not on again, until Season 3, what’s the point of that glassy tube in the corner of the room? Perhaps I should replace it with a neverending loop of The Simpsons?
I won’t spoil 24’s ending, for those with wills of iron who’ve videoed the last episode, and who’re watching it later, except to say the script writers could’ve spent a little more time working on some of the slushier last-reel dialogue. However, except for this single forgivable rewriting lapse, I’ll be there for Season 3, propped up with a glass of Californian red, a cheese board, and a syringe full of adrenaline for heart-stopping emergencies.
OK, so it’s Federal US agents, paid for with coerced taxes, and the US government cabinet is populated with dimwits, fascists, and believers in Medicaid, but what a series! And what a body count! Is Kiefer Sutherland going to be the first James Bond born on the wrong side of the Atlantic? I don’t know, but whatever the weather, and if he can’t do a proper British accent, he’d certainly make a great Felix Leiter, or an excellent villain. (And with a Scottish surname, like Sutherland, surely he can cut the Connery-esque mustard?)
So, as I wander into the night, to prepare for another week teaching 26 people the joys of learning Perl (oh, those lucky people!), I also wonder how close to the knuckle the next series can go? It got really razor-blade sharp this time, with calls for leaders not to go to war against Middle East countries without really conclusive evidence (were you watching there, in Barbados, Mr ’45 minutes, Niger Yellowcake’ Blair?), but Season 2 is going to be a hard monkey to slap. However, I have faith.
Go, Kiefer baby, go!
Just for those who haven’t heard yet, and timed to coincide with the world-wide release of Terminator III, Arnold Schwarzenegger has decided to run for the Governorship of California. His politics are described as being socially liberal and economically conservative. Does this mean he’s a thinly-disguised libertarian?
I don’t know, but what I do like is what he said about the current Democrat Governor of California, Gray Davis, who’s just run up a record state budget deficit of $24 billion dollars:
The politicians are fiddling, fumbling and failing. The man that is failing the people more than anyone is Gray Davis. He is failing them terribly, and this is why he needs to be recalled, and this is why I’m going to run for governor.
Whichever way you want to put it, $24 billion dollars is a whole heap of schmoola, and the taxpayers of California, who’re expected to put their hands in their pocket to repay it, have just acquired themselves a rather interesting candidate to help them do it. May the best tax and spending terminator win!
There is, of course, one other thing which must be said about this news story. It will be back! (sorry)
Following on from Mr Carr’s education piece, earlier in the week, comes further ‘pragmatic’ news from the UK’s Qualifications and Curriculum Authority.
In a bid to make the UK’s A-level mathematics courses more ‘accessible’, this august and incorruptible State body has announced it will be making the subject even ‘easier’. Is this possible? And please don’t laugh at the next bit, it’s really not funny. To study it, you won’t even need to have studied elementary algebra, beforehand. Yep, you heard that right.
No doubt the honest government which rules us won’t then take the increased grades, which they hope will result from this heavyweight dumbing-down operation, and use them to promote how effective their education policies have been? Yeah, right.
Is the UK the only country in the world in which even Homer Simpson could get an A* grade, in a higher education mathematics qualification? Maybe, not this year. But give them a chance. I’m sure they’ll get there eventually. Everyone must have prizes.
In the meantime, the poisoned A-level gold standard is going the same way as the Pound Sterling gold standard, i.e. straight down the pan to get the UK government off the hook of its own continuing failure. Expect all private schools to abandon A-levels, entirely, within the next few years, to replace them with the International Baccalaureate. A-levels will then become purely the concern of the State system, which will suit the State admirably, as they’ll be able to inflate their achievements to levels of magnificence previously undreamed of, without any reference required to any kind of external reality. What a banana.
So as I gaze lovingly at my A-level certificate, up there on the wall, I wonder if now is not the time to replace it with a small poster of Kylie Minogue, in the hope that when she visits she’ll be much more impressed. I should be so lucky.
I don’t know if AynRand.org runs an annual awards ceremony, but if they do, I’d like to nominate Michael O’Leary, the Ryanair chief executive, for the Hank Rearden Award for Top Quality Businessman of the Year. Check out this piece, in today’s Telegraph.
Just to tempt you, here’s some quotes:
We are never paying a dividend as long as I live and breathe and as long as I’m the largest individual shareholder.
It gets better:
Go to Waterside [BA headquarters] and tell Rod [BA’s chief executive] he’s going to grow profits by 12pc this year and he’d have an orgasm… God speed [Rod]. You’re doing an outstanding job. Keep it up.
Our friends, the EU, are also thinking of prosecuting Ryanair on some spurious grounds of whether Ryanair received state aid at Charleroi airport, its Brussels’ base. O’Leary describes this as:
Regulatory bullsh*t.
Excellent! Michael O’Leary has also said that if the EU rule against him, he will shut Charleroi down, and sack its 3,000 workforce. He rounded off this promise, in typically uncompromising fashion, with the following statement:
I’ve no intention of making life easy for bureaucrats.
Bravo, sir! Unfortunately for Dagny Taggart-style ladies everywhere, multi-millionaire Michael O’Leary is getting hitched soon, though he’s not letting it put him off his financial stride:
The reception is going to be cheap. The honeymoon is going to kill me.
Though recently, his thoughts have also strayed to politics and sport:
I think a right-wing dictatorship led by me would not only improve the Irish economy but the Irish football team too.
What a dude. I’ve got some Irish blood in me. If Michael O’Leary ever becomes Prime Minister of Ireland, I wonder if they’ll let me swap passports? I quite fancy Dundalk, which remarkably, is also the home town of The Corrs.
In an extraordinary confession, and despite earlier strong denials, Downing Street has admitted that the Prime Minister’s personal spokesman, Tom Kelly, had spun a story to several newspapers that Dr David Kelly, the UK government’s senior Iraq weapons inspector, was a ‘Walter Mitty’ fantasist. Dr David Kelly’s funeral is due to be held tomorrow.
Sorry Tom, when I first caught this story I totally misheard it. I thought when I heard the words ‘Walter Mitty’ and ‘Downing Street’, together, it could only be one person you were talking about. You know, that blokey bloke, the one with the hair and the smile, the one who fantasises about taking over the world, the one who tells the world of his standing on the terraces at the Gallowgate End, his stowing away to the Caribbean, and a host of other fibs to try to make us like him more. Not to mention the never-ending lies and spin from his corrupt government power-grab machine, which started off with the Bernie Ecclestone saga, worked through to the undisputed NHS achievements, and went gone on to include the threat of weapons of mass destruction, in Iraq, all primed and ready to go off in a measly forty-five minutes. Plus, of course, we won’t even mention the endless slippery associations with other puff serial merchants like Peter Mandelson, Stephen Byers, and the lugubrious Peter Foster.
And I promise to forget the biggest planned lie of all, the one where Alastair Campbell leaves the government, to miraculously clear out the Augean stables of New Labour mendacity, which then presents us with a fresh new Mr Blair, a cleaned-up Mr Blair, and an un-spun Mr Blair, representing all that is Herculean and noble about the way, the light, and the truth of your fabulous and continuing reign of New Labour glory.
Yes, I promise to forget all of the above, because I got it wrong. You weren’t speaking about the Dear Leader at all. What you were attempting to do was to deliberately destroy the name and reputation of a dead man who (probably) killed himself because you, or Tony, or Geoff, or Alastair, or all of you in Downing Street, hung him out to dry and let him twist in the wind, because he may have revealed one of the many Big Lies at the heart of your Big Lie government. Let me remind you of something Adolf Hitler once said:
The great masses of the people will more easily fall victims to a great lie than to a small one
You may have got away with the forty-five minutes lie, because it was such a Hitlerian whopper. But now you’ve been rumbled on the little lies, like the Walter Mitty one about Dr Kelly, it really is all over, bar the denials, for all of you there in Downing Street. Because nobody will believe any of the big ones any more. What’s really funny, however, is that the sun-blessed one really is in the Caribbean, for once, though this time one presumes he didn’t need to go as a stowaway. You should’ve listened to Adolf.
In a move which will be the effective creation of a state ID card, Dr Liam Fox, the Conservative health spokesman, has said the next Conservative government will introduce a health entitlement card for all UK citizens.
Thanks, Liam. It’s just what I’ve always wanted.
These cards will either be difficult-to-forge, requiring a trip to a police station to get your iris scanned, or they will be easy to forge, requiring a used tenner in the heroin-dealing under-the-table pub of your choice, to get hold of an effective fake one.
And given that the black market works free of most government interference, except for the bribes necessary to pay off police enforcers, expect even hard-to-forge ID cards to come on the black market for under a tenner within a couple of years.
So in order to garner a few short-term votes, Dr Liam Fox is willing to foist a new hideous layer of expensive bureaucratic control upon us, which will be easily circumvented by everyone except by the guiltless and the honest. Though I’m sure that when it is, an even more expensive and intrusive ID card system will be the solution proposed by the next Conservative government, once again to ‘protect’ the blessed NHS.
Don’t prevaricate, Liam. Just abolish the NHS, and have done with this Jurassic-Age monster.
Though I think I’m rapidly approaching the Carrite position, where just like the pigs in ‘Animal Farm’, the difference between New Labour and the Conservatives is becoming ever more difficult to discern.
Until even recently I held great hope for the Conservative party, but over these continuing issues of ID cards I am losing my belief.
I blame that Murray Rothbard. His books are just too enlightening.
You know, some days I wake up and I despair. Samizdata is filled with a waterfall of stories because we’re living in one of the most dangerous hate-filled ages of humanity, festooned with statists, hatists and ecologists.
The world is awash with these idiots, fools, and destroyers of the human spirit.
But then…
But then on other days I know, I feel it in my bones, from the smile on my son’s face, that we will emerge triumphant from this gathering gateway of horror.
Oh I pray, I pray to the atheistic God I worship, that a saviour will come to free us from this tyranny.
And then I realise that we don’t need a God, and we don’t need a saviour.
The spirit is within us all. This is the spirit of freedom, the spirit of adventure, and the spirit of hope.
It has sustained us since we crawled out of Africa one hundred thousand years ago, the product of four billion years of evolution. It has sustained us through four thousand bitter years of recorded history, and it has sustained us throughout that most terrible of centuries, the twentieth century of socialism, fascism, and communism.
We will not let these people destroy us; we will not let these people crush us underfoot. We will defeat them. We will free them from the horror which wraps their minds.
Yes, the past and the present belong to them, my friends, and may belong to them for a few more years yet.
But.
The future? The future, be assured. The future belongs to us.
The BBC’s flagship radio station, Radio1, has dropped below the 10 million listeners barrier for the first time in its history, as reported in today’s Grauniad.
In a related piece, in today’s Torygraph, Neil McCormick questions the way records are selected for Radio1’s main play-list. Apparently, it’s done in exactly the same way that commercial radio stations do it.
Which begs the immediate questions; what then is the purpose of Radio1? And why are we tax-plebs forced to contribute so much towards it, via the BBC licence fee? In the commercial arena its listeners could easily pay for it via the advertising market they would generate.
I hope the funding, which goes into Radio1, isn’t being used to support an otherwise large and unnecessary layer of grateful lefties, in palatial BBC comfort, to stop them having to work for a living.
And in return for such largesse, I hope these lefties aren’t then broadcasting the continuous message, to all of Radio1’s impressionable younger listeners, that the state is wonderful, in all of its great and holy facets.
I should coco.
Who’d have thought it? The UK Department of Health has said ID cards are the best way for removing health tourism from the UK government’s dreadful National Health Service (NHS). What a coincidence that the Home Office, which has been struggling for decades to find a problem necessitating an ID card solution, are trying to introduce just the very thing. And at this exact moment in time? Fancy that.
And here’s the best part. State-subsidised UK family doctors already refuse people access rights to their medical lists, if they don’t have the correct UK citizenship qualifications or residency permissions. Yes, the very people whom the ID card is supposed to prevent abusing the glorious wonders of the NHS, are already prevented from abusing it, at least up to the point the government is prepared to stop them. And whatever happens, the Department of Health have said, nobody will ever be refused emergency treatment, whatever their circumstances.
So currently, without ID cards in place, all those whom the state deems invalid for NHS treatment must go to Accident and Emergency departments, which will treat everyone who turns up regardless of status. And in the envisaged ID card NHS future, all those whom the state deems invalid for NHS treatment must go to Accident and Emergency departments, which will treat everyone who turns up regardless of status. Err…Doh?
The only solution to stop ‘health tourism’, where hapless British taxpayers are forced to subsidise the health needs of various global parasites, is to abolish the NHS. Immediately.
That way, everyone pays for what they need, or insures themselves against what they might need. And Britain can start becoming a welcoming place again, which people only come to for its wet Welsh weather and its fine Breakspear ales, rather than trying to sponge off our coerced goodwill after fighting their way through malevolent Blunkettesque security, at the ports of entry, before finding the nearest organised crime ID card forger.
Is this solution too simple, or should I be strung from the nearest lamp-post for daring to suggest that the great white elephant of our wondrous National Health Service should be slaughtered right here, and right now? String me up, baby. It can’t come a moment too soon.
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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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