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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We will find any means we can to further restrict them because I hate guns. I don’t think people should have guns unless they’re police or in the military or in the security industry. There is no earthly reason for people to have… ordinary citizens should not have weapons. We do not want the American disease imported into Australia
So said re-elected Australian Prime Minister John Howard, in an interview on April 17 this year. (Audio here). While Howard is certainly America’s friend in the war against Islamic fundamentalism, you should actually be careful before assuming that he shares your position on much else. This is after all a man who once introduced a hypothecated income tax specifically for the compulsory purchase of people’s firearms.
(Link via Tim Lambert.)
For what Britons and Canadians pay in taxes for their miserable government health service, they ought to be entitled to three terminal diseases a year.
– The incomparable Mark Steyn, being the incomparable Mark Steyn. (Personally, I find the NHS so unspeakable that I try to delay going to the doctor until those times that I visit Australia. But that might be just me).
Yesterday, I visited some friends in Cambridge. In the evening I was in no great hurry to go home, so I went for a stroll around the colleges and other attractions in the city centre.
The centre of Cambridge in August is a little strange, as most of the university students have gone home, but the town is none the less still bustling with tourists and language students. The many pubs and restaurants are full of people, but the feel of the town is entirely different to how it is at other times of year.
Wandering around the corner from Trumpington Street, I found myself passing The Eagle, described by the sign outside the door as “The most famous pub in Cambridge”. This is likely true, although these days it is not a pub frequented much by university people, as it trades on its fame, selling rather overpriced beer to visitors to the city.
This pub is famous for two things. One is that it was a favourite pub of RAF airmen based nearby during the Second World War. Much of the ceiling of the pub is covered with graffiti writen by airmen prior to dangerous missions. There are various other pictures, model aircraft and similar things in the pub commemorating this aspect of its history.
There are also pictures of assorted other famous Cambridge people (Newton, Byron, and others) on some of the walls, but there somewhat oddly there are no pictures relating to the other reason why the pub is famous. In 1954 two men had some lengthy conversations about a certain scientific matter in one of the bars. At the end of one such session they announced to the barman and fellow drinkers that “We have discovered the secret of life”.
These men were of course James Watson and Francis Crick. Oddly, the proprieters of the pub seem to lack a proper sense of the significance of all this, as the only mention of Watson and Crick anywhere in the pub is a small hand-written sign next to the bar noting that this was the bar where they made their announcement. (However, the significance is well known by others, and the role of the pub was mentioned in many of the obituaries of Francis Crick upon his death just a few weeks ago).
And it was this recent death I think that led me to walk into the pub, buy myself a beer, and raise my glass to the memory of the scientist. I was just considering the question as to whether the discovery that was announced just near where I was sitting was indeed the greatest scientific discovery of the twentieth century (on reflection quite possibly) when my mobile phone rang.
The phone did not show the number of the calling party. This usually means a business call, making it a slightly curious thing to receive at half past eight on a Saturday evening.
“This is <incomprehensible> pizza and kebabs. You ordered a ham and mushroom pizza”.
“No, I didn’t. You have a wrong number”.
“No. I am calling the number that came up on the phone when you called me.”
“In what city are you? I am in Cambridge. If you are not, it is unlikely that I ordered a pizza from you”.
“You ordered a pizza”.
“I am in Cambridge. Where are you?”
“You ordered a pizza from me”.
“No. You have a wrong number”.
“No. Your number came up on my phone. Don’t ever do this again.”
He was starting to get angry. At that point, my choices were to either get upset and start insulting him, to continue playing a game of “Where in the United Kingdom is Carmen Sandiego?” in the hope of convincing him that I could not have possibly ordered a pizza, or to just hang up, and I chose to hang up.
As it happens though, I now rather wish I had not done so, and that I had instead asked him some questions about his telephone. (At least if I could have got him to calm down). Either he manually transcribed the number that came up on his caller ID, and then made an error recording or dialing the number of his customer, in which case there was no mystery. Or, he had a system that automatically logged the number and then dialed me back without the number having to be entered manually. In this case, I do understand why he might not have believed me. This would have had to have meant that there was a bug or malfunction in his equipment or somewhere in the phone network. Which for simple things like forwarding numbers is not something we expect these days.
But as a disruption to the general karma of my day, this was a curious one. Not perhaps as curious as being stopped in the street by a teenage girl and asked if they had ice cream in Victorian times, but still curious. Somewhat sadly, it did completely destroy the solemnity of the drink I was having to the memory of a great scientist.
In another perilous time – 1918 – Lord Haig wrote of Lord Derby: “D is a very weak-minded fellow I am afraid and, like the feather pillow, bears the marks of the last person who has sat on him.” It’s subtler than that with Kerry: you don’t have to sit on him; just the slightest political breeze, and his pillow billows in the appropriate direction. His default position is the conventional wisdom of the Massachusetts Left: on foreign policy, foreigners know best; on trade, the labour unions know best; on government, bureaucrats know best; on defence, graying ponytailed nuclear-freeze reflex anti-militarists know best; on the wine list, he knows best.
-Mark Steyn, getting stuck in to the Democrats’ truly unimpressive presidential candidate. (This is worth reading, too).
As a general rule, I am not a huge fan of Microsoft. I am not tremendously keen on their software from a design or reliability point of view, and I find their business practices at times to be a bit dubious.
However, yesterday they won 3.95 million dollars in damages from a spammer in Washington DC, who sent out huge numbers of e-mail messages that claimed to come from Microsoft in order to encourage people to download a toolbar that then downloaded all manner of nasty spyware and advertising.
Microsoft have won a total of $54m in recent judgements in their campaign against spammers. Generally the judgements have not been against the practice of spam per se but against the deceptive practices of the spammers (ie the spams have been full of lies).
Might I wish Bill and the boys continued success in this campaign.
On August 17, 1980, a woman named Lindy Chamberlain reported to the police that her nine week old baby daughter Azaria had been taken by a dingo (ie a wild dog) from the tent where she and her family had been holidaying in a campsite near Ayers Rock (Uluru) in Australia’s Northern Territory.
The events of the resulting Azaria Chamberlain case, in which Chamberlain was ultimately convicted of the murder of her daughter, and the conviction was later quashed after the forensic evidence was completely discredited, are epochal and notorious in the country’s psyche. There are occasional media and news events when a whole nation is watching. What they are and will be is sometimes hard to predict, and it’s sometimes hard to tell just why everybody is watching, but this was one of those cases where people were watching because of the bizarre quality of the case and the luridness of the allegations. And as nothing has ever really been settled, the case has lingered on in the media in the 24 years since. Despite various claims, most people (including myself) have been of the belief that we would never see definite evidence as to exactly what happened.
At least, not until this week. As it happens, a story that has been told this week that may or may not be true (although once some excavations have taken place we will know), but which is almost as strange as the original events, and which would (if true) explain all the facts. Although maybe it will be true and we still won’t have any definite proor, because four of the five people involved are dead, including those who would know the location of the body. So perhaps an old man has just made up a story.
But first, the background. → Continue reading: One of the strangest cases in Australian history gets even stranger
This post is one of my articles that explains how it is possible to screw an industry up beyond words with excessive regulation, and the consequences of doing so can occur in unexpected places. The story is in this case about how government attempted to protect the BBC and ended up giving enormous quasi-monopolistic powers to Rupert Murdoch. Next week, I shall post a similar history of the regulation or television in Australia, which explains how government attempted to give enormous quasi-monopolistic powers to Kerry Packer, and ended up giving enormous quasi-monopolistic powers to Kerry Packer.
Until a week and a half ago, British people were watching the European Championship football championship between the national teams of the best footballing countries of Europe, the English in the hope that England would win the tournament, and the Scottish in the hope that England would be eliminated early and embarassingly. Neither of these things happened: England played decently but not spectacularly and were eliminated on penalties in the quarter finals. If England had stayed in the tournament the number of cross of St George flags attached to people’s cars in this country would have steadily increased, it would have been impossible to go into a pub and had a discussion of anything else, national euphoria may have even broken out and, sady, there would have been a somewhat unpleasant yob element on the streets shortly after closing time. As an Australian, I think I would have found that (and the fact that the English would have been gloating for years if not decades) a bit much, so I am glad that it didn’t happen. Instead, I watched the rest of the tournament (which finished yesterday evening) with interest both on television at home and in pubs with much smaller crowds than would have been the case if England were still participating. The story of the tournament was that the large heavyweight countries of Europe were eliminated relatively early, and the teams from the smaller countries excelled themselves.
In yesterday’s final the host nation Portugal (regarded as a good side from before the start of the tournament, although not one of the extreme favourites to win it) took on Greece (who at the start of the tournament were absolute rank outsiders who most people would not have picked to win a match let alone the tournament). And as it happened, Greece won a perhaps a little dull and defensive (but with lots of heart) 1-0 victory, and a team that had never won a match in the finals of either the European Championship or the World Cup before are now champions of Europe. (The slightly desperate question of whether the Olympic stadium in Athens will be complete in time for the start of the Games in six weeks now has the added question of whether the Greeks will have stopped partying by then. I was in Sydney four years ago for the 2000 games, and at this point we were just coming to grips with the fact that the games were almost upon us. We didn’t really start partying until the games actually started.
It was not hard to find a place to watch yesterday’s final, because it was on two terrestrial television channels (licence fee funded BBC1 and advertising funded ITV1) simultaneously as well as satellite channel Eurosport. This followed what happened earlier in the tournament, which is that the matches have been divided evenly between the two broadcasters. Half the matches were on the BBC, and the other half on ITV, and who got to show which matches was decided more or less randomly. Neither network has been able to gain an advantage over the other by advertising itself as “The Euro 2004 channel” or anything like that.
This may seem curious. Why is what should be one of the biggest sporting events of the year on two television stations simultaneously? Given that lots and lots of people are likely to want to watch it (or would have if England were playing) would it not be of lots of value to advertisers and therefore wouldn’t the organisers of the tournament want to make huge amounts of money by auctioning the television rights to the highest bidder.
Well, actually no.
Well, actually probably yes, but this is not permitted. → Continue reading: How watching the European Championship football tells us a lot about the history of British television.
They’re against NATO? What are they for? Soviet troops racing across Europe, eating all the croissants?
– US Naval Officer Fred Boynton (played by Chris Eigeman), in Whit Stillman’s Barcelona, a film that appears wiser by the day.
Indeed, according to this survey, Ronald McDonald House is twice as trusted as Amnesty International and more than twice as trusted as the Australian Conservation Foundation and Greenpeace.
– The Australian news site Crikey.com.au, reporting on a survey of Australian opinions on the trustworthiness of various charities that was conducted by the Australian edition of Reader’s Digest.
When I was in my native Australia a couple of months back, I was pleased to discover that it is at last possible to fly around the country on Australia’s airlines for something like the at times very low cost of flying around Europe. Traditionally, domestic air tickets in Australia have been mind blowingly expensive due to truly astonishingly stupid over-regulation of the industry. (Just as an example, for several decades only two airlines were licensed to fly domestically in Australia, one state owned and one privately owned. These two airlines were required to charge identical fares, operate identical aircraft, offer an identical number of seats on each route, honour each other’s tickets, and operate to identical timetables. This meant that if one airline wanted to fly an 9am flight to Sydney, the other airline had to agree to do so before it would be permitted). Getting rid of this asonishingly stupid over-regulation has been a slow and painful 20 year experience. Thankfully, though, it is largely gone. Although there is still far too little competition, the competition is now clearly on its way.
In any event, I was explaining this to Brian Micklethwait last month over a cup of tea, and he suggested I should write it up. I started doing so for this blog, but the story was sufficiently long and esoteric that by the time I had finished I discovered that I had written 6000 words, and it was a little too long and esoteric. Therefore, I have posted it to Transport Blog, where it probably more belongs.
And if you have ever wondered how Australia got from being the richest country in the world at the beginning of the twentieth century to being substantially behind the pack (although still a rich country) in 1980, and how it has managed to catch up substantially again since then, the answer is quite a lot of this sort of regulation and protectionism, followed by a substantial (and it times quite hesitant) about turn in the early 1980s, and this story captures most of the key details.
While elections for the British national government are not due until 2006, there are lots of less important elections. This week, we get to vote for the mayor of London, various other local government positions, and for the European parliament. As television and radio political advertising is illegal in Britain (yes, really) we are not bombarded with media political campaigning the way people are in the US or in my native Australia. But one gets to see bits of campaigning just the same.
As it happens, I was today having lunch in a cafe in Tottenham Court Road in central London. As I was doing so, a large open topped double decker bus with lots of balloons on it, and various people standing on top came down the street. Yes, it was the RESPECT coalition, George Galloway’s bunch of anti-war anti-American anti-Blair pro-Saddam Hussein idiotarians. And there was George himself standing on top.
Delightful. I was sitting in the sun, having a pleasant lunch, and I was given the added opportunity to make rude gestures at George Galloway, which I proceeded to do. I would have also liked to have shouted something along the lines of “Go to prison you treasonous money grubbing genocidal dictator loving scumbag” or something like that. However, I was sitting with an Arab friend of mine with whom political discussions are sometimes interesting and who had been nice enough to pay for my mushroom ravioli, and I really didn’t want to cause a scene.
Sadly, the belt buckle on my digital camera’s case recently broke, and as a consequence I did not have the camera with me and I thus did not manage to get a photograph of this tremendous piece of political action. Remind me to get the strap fixed.
When Ronnie wrote his letter to the people telling them that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, I didn’t really know or understand what that meant. I really didn’t. But I found out. Those with Alzheimer’s are on a rocky path that only goes downhill. Ronnie’s long journey has finally taken him to a distant place where I can no longer reach him. We can’t share the wonderful memories of our 52 years together, and I think that’s probably the hardest part. And because of this, I’m determined to do what I can to save other families from this pain. And now science has presented us with a hope called stem cell research, which may provide our scientists with many answers that have for so long been beyond our grasp. I just don’t see how we can turn our backs on this.
– Nancy Reagan, speaking last month.
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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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