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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Just as the NHS is the darling of the British people, it will come as no surprise that its failures are increasingly covered by the tabloids, who have found that the crisis in health provision is a concern to those who have to rely on the state through no fault of their own. High taxes and expensive private health care denies choice to the majority of the population.
One of the latest (and incredible) stories to emerge is a lack of mops in Victoria Infirmary in Glasgow:
PATIENTS spent two days in “grotty” wards – after a hospital ran out of mops.
Cleaners at the Victoria Infirmary in Glasgow were left stunned after bosses told them of the shortage. And it took two working days for the hospital to replace all the mops.
A source at the closure-threatened hospital said: “We knew things were bad here but this takes the biscuit. Cleaners went to work on Wednesday and were told there were no mops and nothing could be done about it
Only scenes such as these could be caused by a state monopoly of health:
After replacement mops arrived on Thursday, a source revealed that hospital staff celebrated.
The insider revealed: “People were dancing around the boxes, singing and chanting, ‘We have mops.’ ” The source added: “No wonder our hospitals are riddled with MRSA superbugs and such like if they can’t get something as simple as this right.”
Only the NHS could ration health and mops!
We know that it took Ian Blair a day to find out that an innocent man was killed by his officers. We know that he foresees little difficulty in retraining ex-soldiers on short-term contracts to act as armed police officers, accelerating the trend towards paramilitary forces in British cities.
Sir Ian’s suggestion that soldiers could be used as firearm officers is specially controversial after the shooting in London in July of Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian electrician mistaken for a suicide bomber the day after the failed July 21 attacks.
A Scotland Yard spokesman later said that retiring servicemen were just one group with pre-existing skills that could be hired on short-term contracts to allow police officers to focus on core policing activities. “It is absolutely not about hiring in soldiers for use on London’s streets,” the spokesman said.
We also know that, infected by memes of ‘command and control’, he wishes to shortcircuit archaic constitutional liberties that protect the individual, reduce the accountability of the police and give them additional quasi-judicial powers:
Radical proposals for a new breed of supercop with on-the-spot powers to confiscate driving licences and issue Anti-Social Behaviour Orders have been put forward by Britain’s top policeman.
Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair, whose proposals were backed by the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo), admitted allowing officers to impose instant punishments could blur the line between police and magistrates…..
Director of civil rights group Liberty, Shami Chakrabarti, accused the Commissioner of behaving like Judge Dredd, the post-apocalyptic policeman-come-executioner in British comic 2000AD, whose catchphrase is “I am the law”.
Ian Blair stated that he thought of resigning (as if it were a particularly hard day at the office?) :
However, he told Mr Sakur he did not come “very close at all” to quitting. “Because the big job is to defend this country against terrorism and that’s what I’m here to do.” He added it would not have been right for the force, “the country or the city of London” for him to resign.
Yes it would.
Will someone explain that to the BBC? As part of their news coverage, the BBC website will often construct webpages that quote from various press outlets around the world with a description of commonalities that these quotes may share. For example, on Katrina, the commentary of a piece entitled “World press berates US over Katrina” notes that:
Newspapers around the world are critical of the US government’s response to Hurricane Katrina, and its foreign and environmental policies more generally.
Links are made to regional concerns, with Asian papers recalling last December’s tsunami and African commentators highlighting the racial issue.
But some sympathy comes from Indonesia, and an Afghan newspaper takes pride in President Karzai’s offer of assistance.
However, of the thirteen newspapers quoted, the BBC does not endeavour to inform its audience that, at a conservative estimate, half function as government mouthpieces or operate under various restrictions. So, a Zimbabwean newspaper, the Daily Herald, that BBC Monitoring identifies as a government owned daily, from an unfree state, is quoted without qualification, providing free publicity for ZANU-PF.
The fact that New Orleans is a southern town predominantly populated by African-Americans explains why President George W. Bush did not see the need to cut short his holiday. All that Bush has done so far is to issue threats against the victims, and deploying trigger-happy American troops – fresh from abusing Iraqi prisoners – to go and “restore order
We should not be surprised at this. If you turn to the BBC Monitoring’s profile of the UK media, you would be surprised at the prominent role of public broadcasting versus commercial outfits, backed by a picture of Broadcasting House and a link to BBC history. The passage starts:
The UK has a strong tradition of public-service broadcasting and an international reputation for creative programme-making.
The fledgling BBC began daily radio broadcasts in 1922 and quickly came to play a pivotal role in national life. The Empire Service – the forerunner of the BBC World Service – established a reputation worldwide. The BBC is funded by a licence fee, which all households with a TV set must pay.
This bias runs throughout the entire piece. Our newspaper industry are relegated to a single sentence. Even the Hutton report acquires positive spin and two paragraphs! And look at the radio stations listed…
The variety of publications on sale reflects the full spectrum of political opinion, as well as the British public’s voracious appetite for newspapers.
The biased BBC does not have the capacity to objectively describe itself. It is unable to distinguish between free or unfree sources in its quotations. The global press is defined as a privileged and professional group because of the outlets they work for, not because of the objective and honest standards that journalists are supposed to maintain. Without this qualification, the writings of Comrade Bob’s mouthpiece, a Chinese journalist who writes only what his masters want to hear and a reporter protected by the First Amendment are presented as equally valid to the reader. The BBC news website provides the professional credentials and recognition that propaganda masquerading as journalism craves.
…the only way to use (teleportation) as a secret weapon is to allow our enemies to bankrupt themselves thinking they can produce a teleportation machine.
The Air Force is to be applauded for investigating technologies that may have value for national security…But wormholes, negative energies, warped space-time, etc., require futuristic technologies centuries to millions of years ahead of ours. The only thing going down the wormhole is taxpayers’ money.
Michio Kaku
Whilst the after-effects of Hurricane Katrina will take weeks to unfold, the ‘experts’ flocked to the disaster. They squawked the usual litany of ‘climate change’ and oiloholic armageddon, overjoyed that they now had a ready-made disaster to cite as evidence. And, of course, such relish could not be served without the knowledge that their moral certainty had been strengthened by the dead Americans; corpses that will serve as an additional accusation in the long list of crimes attributed to President George Bush.
James Glassman, over at TCS, quotes some of the “environmental extremists” who wrote before they thought.
But that doesn’t stop an enviro-predator like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from writing on the Huffingtonpost website: “Now we are all learning what it’s like to reap the whirlwind of fossil fuel dependence which Barbour and his cronies have encouraged. Our destructive addiction has given us a catastrophic war in the Middle East and – now — Katrina is giving our nation a glimpse of the climate chaos we are bequeathing our children.”
Or consider Jurgen Tritten, Germany’s environmental minister, in an op-ed in the Frankfurter Rundschau. He wrote (according to a translation prepared for me): “By neglecting environmental protection, America’s president shuts his eyes to the economic and human damage that natural catastrophes like Katrina inflect on his country and the world’s economy.”
The bright side of Katrina, concludes Tritten, is that it will force President Bush to face facts. “When reason finally pays a visit to climate-polluter headquarters, the international community has to be prepared to hand America a worked-out proposal for the future of international climate protection.”
He goes on, “There is only one possible route of action. Greenhouse gases have to be radically reduced, and it has to happen worldwide.” In other words, thanks to Katrina, we’ll finally get Kyoto enforced. (He might start at home, by the way. Europe is not anywhere close to reducing CO2 to Kyoto standards. In fact, the U.S. is doing much better than many Kyoto ratifiers.)
Tritten is unrepentant about his article.
Yet, despite the uproar he has caused, Trittin remains unrepentant. On Wednesday, his spokesman Michael Schroeren even said that he “can’t understand … at all” why Americans are upset. Trittin’s comments “are true and he wrote what he meant.”
Perhaps he would understand if he had to hand out food parcels to the homeless or dig out corpses from the mud. But we know one universal truth about politicians from the European Union: they never dirty their hands because of their pristine ideals.
Perfect 10, an adult website, sued Google last November for infringing upon its copyrighted material, its trademarks and, to get bang for their bucks, unfair competition. The original complaint was covered by Wendy Seltzer.
Now, Perfect 10 has requested that Google is prevented from showing any of their copyrighted images. Their argument is that, through advertisements accompanying these images, Google profits from their display even though it is perceived to be a free search engine:
Perfect 10 sued Google in November of 2004. It says that Google is displaying hundreds of thousands of adult images, “from the most tame to the most exceedingly explicit, to draw massive traffic to its website, which it is converting into hundreds of millions of dollars of advertising revenue.”
Perfect 10 claims that under the guise of being a search engine, Google is displaying, free of charge, thousands of copies of the best images from Perfect 10, Playboy, nude scenes from major movies, nude images of supermodels, as well as extremely explicit images of all kinds.
Dr. Norm Zada, the founder of Perfect 10, argues that the business model of Google, whereby images can be displayed and downloaded for free without accessing the original website, reduces the profitability of pay-per-view pornographic websites. Furthermore, as the majority of searches are for pornographic images, this represents a misappropriation of intellectual property, since Google depends upon lust for its profits, at the expense of companies like Perfect 10.
Overture’s Key Selector Tool indicates that most searches on the internet are sex-related,” says Zada. “Google’s extraordinary gain in market cap from nothing a few years ago to close to eighty billion dollars, is more due to their massive misappropriation of intellectual property than anything else,” says Zada.
This court case represents an attack upon the business model of Google. It also demonstrates the unresolved tensions between the perceptions of intellectual property that pervade new and old media. Zada explains why his injunction is beneficial to other traditional media outlets:
Any website publisher can sign up for Google AdSense. It’s an easy way for publishers to display Google ads – those being paid for by its AdWords customers – on their content pages. AdWords customers pay Google and Google pays a commission to AdSense publishers. So Google can maximise its revenues by maximising the traffic that it sends to AdSense affiliates. Perfect 10 does not suggest that Google is weighting its search results in favour of AdSense-supported sites; but it does argue that Google profits directly from the popularity of porn, and its particular concern is that it profits from Perfect 10’s porn that has been stolen by others.
Zada believes that the outcome of Perfect 10’s motion for preliminary injunction should have a major impact not only on Perfect 10, but also on traditional media outlets which are losing the ad revenue war to search engines, in part because of all the nude and semi-nude images search engines offer for free.
Right now, he says, consumers who want to view a nude scene involving Halle Berry, Nicole Kidman, or other Hollywood beauties, can view that scene for free by visiting a search engine without purchasing the DVD. “If all an infringer needs to avoid liability is to provide some sort of a ‘search function,’ that will be the end of intellectual property in this country,” says Zada.
Is this a principled defence of intellectual property or an opportunistic front in the war against the new media?
The Muslim Council of Britain has demanded a public apology from the BBC over the broadcasting of a Panorama programme last night which they have castigated as a “travesty“. A quick glance at their statement throws light upon their concerns, namely, that the programme aims to undermine the Islamic faith by presenting imams as extremists and that it is designed to “sabotage” the political participation of Muslims in the British mainstream. The most telling quote is,
It seems that to qualify as so-called ‘moderates’ Muslims are required to remain silent about Israeli crimes in Palestine, otherwise they are automatically labelled as ‘extremists’.
The refutation of the MCB’s position is clear. In a society which values free debate, the Muslim Council of Britain should engage with the issues raised. Instead, they have imported the arguments prevalent in the Middle East, which damns all criticism as a Zionist conspiracy designed to undermine Islam. Muslims do not have to remain quiet about Israeli actions that they perceive as criminal. The problem lies with those who justify terror and the deaths of innocents by referring to Israeli actions and tarring every Jew and Israeli Arab with ‘collective guilt’.
This rhetoric is not new, but the platform that Muslim political institutions are gaining in the mainstream media provides a testament to the paradox that they are increasingly confident and increasingly defensive. The popular demonstrations of the anti-war movement and the dividends reaped from the flanking alliance that Muslim organisations arranged with the hard left has gained the political wing of Islam legislative promises such as the outlawing of statements that are deemed offensive. By rubbishing the Panorama programme, the Muslim Council of Britain wishes to build upon these achievements by narrowing the public discussion of Islam in the mainstream media and excising a ‘critical school’ that does not accept their arguments or values.
The terrorist attacks of July 7th have proved to be an opportunity for Muslim organisations regarded as ‘mainstream’. Their spokesmen have been co-opted into government programmes providing channels of communication and extra sources of patronage. However, the terrorist attacks have also raised the profile of these spokesmen. Buoyed by the popularity of the anti-war movement, they have overestimated the depth of support for their views in Middle Britain, confusing the liberals who marched against the Iraqi war with the hard left. That is why we hear the overconfidence of Muslim anti-Zionists in our midst and a growing realisation in certain parts of the Labour Party that members of the Muslim Council of Britain hold illiberal views.
What do you do when you have driven your economy off a cliff? Why, you raise taxes.
Zimbabwe’s finance minister has imposed a string of tax rises to bridge a huge spending shortfall and the effects of drought and slum clearances.
A tax on drinks and cigarettes has been increased by 50% and mobile phone airtime will also be subjected to a 22.5% tax, Herbert Murerwa said.
Zimbabwe is beset with shortages of food, fuel and foreign currency, and rampant unemployment and inflation.
An opposition MP said the extra budget showed that the government was “broke”.
The title is a forgivable slur on King Canute who recognised the natural limits of kingship. With reference to ZANU-PF, it is perhaps more acceptable to use the diminutive of his name, which is, of course, Cnut.
Here is a good article in the National Interest demonstrating how private sector peacekeeping is much better than its UN equivalent. To quote,
Peacekeeping success does not come from a splendid rebirth of Western interest in these missions, but rather from the unheralded role played by the private sector doing jobs once provided by Western militaries, and from a more realistic and pragmatic approach by the funding states. Sent by donor states, private companies are increasingly providing the missing skills, capabilities and, most importantly, the actual will to carry out international mandates in conflict and post-conflict (CPC) situations. The peacekeeping success stories that get the most play by advocates rarely include the central and growing role the private sector is playing to ensure that success. Private firms filling a myriad of non-traditional roles are creating fundamental changes in the way international peace and stability operations are undertaken. From a humanitarian perspective, this is long overdue.
The article argues that the United Nations, only as good as the resources that its members bring to the table, is a useful framework for co-ordinating security co-operation, but argues that its peacekeeping capabilities should be privatised. As they say, from a humanitarian perspective, this is long overdue.
South Korean scientists have cloned the first dog, succeeding at a project where laboratories and firms in the United States had been beavering away for years. This is a salutary lesson for Europe, more than for the United States, that research in biotechnology and stem cells is increasingly taking place in the ‘Wild East’.
An Afghan puppy, called Snuppy, is now alive after this process:
The process of dog cloning remains highly inefficient, a reflection of how much scientists still have to learn about how to make mammalian offspring from single parents and without the help of sperm. Multiple surgeries on more than 100 anesthetized dogs and the painstaking creation of more than 1,000 laboratory-grown embryos led to the birth of just two cloned puppies — one of which died after three weeks.
Animal rights activists were unimpressed.
Snuppy’s birth announcement, published in today’s issue of Nature, was greeted with scorn by some animal care activists, who decried the work as inhumane and wasteful, given the global glut of unwanted dogs.
“The cruelty and the body count outweighs any benefit that can be gained from this,” said Mary Beth Sweetland, a vice president at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals in Norfolk.
Cloned pets remain unviable for some time yet.
Yesterday, I travelled as a foot passenger to Calais on the ferry from Dover, as part of a group celebrating the birthday of a long-standing friend. It was ironic to read the Times on embarkation controls and experience the poorly organised efforts of the Immigration Service. After checking in, all foot passengers are taken on a courtesy bus towards the ferry. However, as the embarkation infrastructure was dismantled in 1998 to save money, they have established an ad hoc arrangement. You have to exit the courtesy bus twice, once to show your passport, the other time: to check your luggage. Such practices were not in evidence on the return journey from France.
We noticed that there were two or three Asian men holding camcorders and filming stairwells, restaurants and the maps of the ferry. This may be innocent behaviour but we took photos of them. The photos have been passed on to the Kent constabulary. This could be something or nothing, but vigilance is the purview of the alert citizen, not a monopoly of our less than competent authorities.
Calais, itself, is a nondescript town whose tourist potential is undermined by the large numbers of illegal immigrants who loiter around the parks and telephone boxes. Most appeared to be from the Middle East of the Horn of Africa. For a Saturday afternoon, they did little apart from sit or chat, cultivating indifference to the French or the holidaymakers. When attempting to look at a map of the town of Calais, that a group of them were obscuring, they quickly got out of the way. Perhaps this indicated past encounters with the French police and a fear of transgressing unspoken rules. Whatever the set-up, they have no place to go apart from the public spaces.
The local beer is worth imbibing and we found a well-stocked Irish pub near the main square that deserves patronage. Nearby is the local war museum, housed in a bunker, with jumbled momentoes of the occupation. Calais suffered heavy damage during the Second World War and testament is apid to this suffering with the photos of local landmarks, just situated outside the bunker, surrounded by piles of rubble and destroyed buildings. A vivid and revealing contrast of sixty years of peace.
To conclude, Calais does not cater for the tourist. We had to walk out of the ferry terminal and into town. Unlike any previous country I have visited, there was no sign for taxis or taxi ranks to pick up arrivals. One existed at the local station in the town although we had to wait for some time before a people carrier appeared. One could muse at the unmet demand for transport from strangers which the locals did not appear to consider a profitable enterprise. You could not help commenting that, in Britain, some of those sitting in the parks would obtain work by driving minicabs, and relieving the taxi drought.
The journalist who is determined to give proof of his objectivity often succumbs to the temptation of maintaining silence with regard to concrete facts, because these facts are in themselves so crude that he is afraid of appearing biased.
– Arthur Koestler
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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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