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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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This is the year that Denys Watkins-Pritchard was born, one hundred years ago, a minor children’s author who bought joy to many schoolboys lurking around public libraries. Although Tolkien was the pre-eminent fantasy author, there were others to delve into on rainy afternoons, and under the pseudonym of ‘BB’, Watkins-Pritchard produced his own elegies to the passing of a pre-industrial England.
The most famous books were The Little Grey Men and The Little Grey Men Go Down The Bright Stream. The adventures of the four last gnomes in England, with the fantastical names of Cloudberry, Dodder, Sneezewort and Baldmoney, and their escape to a rural Ireland remind me of the ‘rural retreat’ that pervaded English literature from the beginning of the industrial age. As with the Cottingley Fairies, that famous fraud perpetrated on the gullible, BB recounted seeing a gnome:
The seeds of the idea for The Little Grey Men were sown when, as a small child, BB saw ‘a diminutive being.3 It had a round, very red, bearded face about the size of a small crab apple. It wasn’t a dream I can still see the little red astonished face.’
When myths and fairie-tales wove a stronger spell on the populace, brought up on rural tales of an idyllic past, the ring of authenticity provided that extra magical effect for the young audience, an extension of Peter Pan into real life.
There is a strand of merging reality and fantasy in British children’s books and plays that can be traced to J.M. Barrie and probably precedes his Neverland. This proved a strong influence throughout the twentieth century and ‘BB’ tapped into the long retreat of magic that was to pervade the work of Alan Garner as well. Some may explain this as the workings of modernity or industrialism or empire but these authors wished to infuse their own pasts with a magical glow and pass it on to new audiences as part of their long summer childhood.
Sometimes, as I take the Bluebell Light Railway, I can imagine that it is passing through the Forest of Boland.
One of the unspoken benefits of globalisation is the use that professionals make of the new instruments and techniques that are publicised over the internet or through the wider dissemination of networks to newly emerging economies, such as India. However, as one example demonstrates, medical professionals in India read or learn about new developments from the West in their specialism but are unable to apply them because they are too expensive or the instruments cannot be imported or the patients are not rich enough to afford them. This is providing a spur to entrepreneurial and philanthropic activity.
Narayana Hrudayalaya is a medical foundation established in India by Mother Teresa’s cardiologist, Davi Prasad Shetty. Acknowledging the dilemma faced by all professionals in poorer countries, Shetty aimed to pioneer low-cost cardiac surgery that would prove affordable, with charitable supplements and insurance for even the Bengali peasantry and textile workers inhabiting the countryside around Kolkata.
In an interview with New Scientist, Shetty understood that governments and international bureaucracies were a hindrance, not a benefit.
If there is one organisation that can be squarely blamed it is the WHO. Headquartered in Geneva, separated from reality, it runs its global activities with help from government representatives who are mostly bureaucrats. In the countries I travel to, bureaucrats are a class of people who are experts in nothing but authorities on everything. They are not best-suited to guide planning at the WHO. One of the WHO declarations was “Health for all by 2000”. How can a global body make that kind of statement when a country like Zambia does not have an echo-Doppler, without which you cannot detect any heart problem, or when one cannot find a single functioning ECG machine in many African countries?
Apart from the WHO, I have stopped blaming the politicians and bureaucrats. We are better placed to bring about changes by being outsiders, not by being a part of the system. All that the government can do is to stop being an obstacle. If it decides to be a bystander, things will fall in place. My belief is that within ten years, the government healthcare systems in all Third World countries will fold up. The government will not be able to pay even salaries, never mind offering healthcare. In that situation, organisations like ours should come forward to take over and manage it in a professional manner.
Whilst Shetty describes himself as a social worker as a libertarian, he has recognised that governments cannot provide the resources to meet his objectives and that it is best if they stand aside or collapse. When the state is no longer a factor, the economics or healthcare starts to add up.
Yes, it’s very different. In Western hospitals, about 60 per cent of the revenue is spent on salaries, while in government hospitals in India, 90 per cent goes on salaries. By contrast, in our hospital only 12 to 13 per cent is spent on salaries. That doesn’t mean our doctors are being exploited. Since their output is ten times more, unit operating costs are very low. To earn a given salary in another hospital, a doctor would have to perform one operation a day. With us he might have to operate on five patients. We also work with zero inventory, so the burden lies with the supplier. And since we are the largest consumers of medical disposables, we procure them at a discount of 30 to 35 per cent.
Increasingly, for the pragmatists of the world, freedom provides the answers that the state is unable to.
The New Labour administration has provided a worthy example of how governments mess up systems of accreditation, especially those established by themselves. Since these are designed to mirror the political biases and triumphs of their founders, rather than provide an objective appraisal of developments, governments begin to tinker with the tables when they produce the wrong results.
One example of this is the education league tables where the government has recently introduced the recording of vocational qualifications in order to offset the academic predominance of private and grammar schools. This has the additional consequence of downgrading academic performance even amongst state schools which are run on an adequate basis.
Under the new system, a distinction in a certificate in cake decorating is worth 55 points – more than a GCSE grade A in physics.
And a City and Guilds progression award in bakery was worth more than five GCSEs at grade C.
The public sector professionals thought this was a terrific wheeze.
But John Dunford, general secretary of the Secondary Heads’ Association, said the added complexity gave parents a better picture.
“In the past the tables have been too simplistic.
“The new tables give parents a broader view of the achievements of schools,” he said.
The more complex the better. No doubt parents prefer complexity since this makes those important decisions so much easier. Time for the market to provide an alternative.
This government hopes to cut its cake, cook it and eat it. However, although Britain is ending up like Golgafrincham, we cannot offload the cake decorators or the telephone earpiece cleaners, so all of the skilled workers and the professionals are emigrating, leaving the Golgafrinchams behind.
Al-Muhajiroun was the extremist organisation that recruited or converted young Muslims and British men to their political goal of a worldwide Islamic state, starting with the Emirate of Great Britain. It was never clear whether they would recognise England, Scotland and Wales but the overall objective was clear. A troublesome development was the disbandment of this organisation which appeared to portend greater underground activity on the part of the radicals.
Hannah Strange, UK correspondent for UPI, was attending a women’s conference where Sheikh Omar, the former head of Al-Muhajiroun, was setting out his philosophy: Since Britain had invaded Iraq, the covenant of security that protected these islands from Islam was now broken, and as a consequence, war was declared. No doubt these sentiments weighed heavily on his heart since his patriotism was not in doubt:
Either withdraw your own forces or don’t expect Muslims not to support the Muslims abroad,” said Sheikh Omar, adding that the West supports dictators abroad when they see fit.
If the government met those conditions, Muslims could continue to live peacefully in Britain, he said.
“After that there will be no need to fight anybody, we’ve been living in peace here for years, and we can continue to live in peace,” he said. “We love Britain.”
However, the usual epithets on 9/11, killing all non-Muslims and blaming the Jews outweighed his love of bully beef and the Queen. It was the story that they always tell themselves. They are not to blame. They were invaded. They are merely defending themselves against the hand that is raised against them. Indeed, their pathology is a puzzling outpouring of delusional bombast reinforced by the blood of innocents. → Continue reading: Who will rid us of these turbulent kuffaar?
Governments are now peddling myths to cover up their own inaction during the first few days of the catastrophe. They are stating that the magnitude of the catastrophe was unknown and, therefore, they did not feel compelled to set up the emergency infrastructure to supply information to distraught relatives. One of the first countries to feel the angry wind is Sweden, where the Foreign Minister attended the theatre on Boxing Day night, with appalling lack of judgement.
Der Spiegel’s article highlights the comparison between government confusion and private sector organisation:
Swedes are fuming. Partly, they are unleashing their rage, horror and sense of utter helplessness in the face of a disaster felt by almost every family, directly or indirectly, in this tightly knit nation of 9 million. But they are also launching some very sharp criticism at a government that failed to absorb the magnitude of the Asian tsunami and took too long to respond. As many as 4,000 Swedes were swept into the tsunami’s watery folds.
An editorial in the mass-circulation Aftonbladet lambasted Swedish Foreign Minister Laila Freivalds for not showing up to work until more than a day after she learned about the disaster. Even worse, said the paper, Freivalds did not sit worriedly at home like so many Swedes on Sunday night. Instead, she went to the theater in Stockholm. She did so knowing full well that, at that point, 10,000 people were already believed dead on Southeast Asia’s beaches, which draw Swedes in droves each winter. And she didn’t exactly rush to get to the office. “At nine o’clock the next day their chairs at the foreign office were still empty,” hissed the paper. “Not until 10.30 a.m., 31.5 hours after the death wave, did the foreign minister arrive at work.”
Is this grounds for Freivalds and Prime Minister Goeran Persson to resign? The paper thinks so, as, it seems do many Swedes. Since Wednesday, the Swedish Ministry has been deluged with thousands of nasty e-mails accusing the government of indecision, failure to act and not doing enough to help stranded and wounded Swedes get home. “You and your government’s incompetence shines like a beacon in the night,” wrote one Swede. “Today, Dec. 28, the government’s weakness and indecisiveness surpassed my wildest and most terrifying fantasies,” wrote another. Commentators, too, are lashing out. “I am ashamed of being Swedish when I have a prime minister who says that he can’t get more people answering telephones because it is Boxing Day (Dec.26) and people have the day off,” wrote Claes Thilander in the newspaper Dagens Nyheter.
This contrasts with the role of Lottie Knutsson, the information director at Fritidsresor, a travel company.
In fact, one of Sweden’s unlikely new stars is Lottie Knutsson, director of information for the travel company Fritidsresor. Since Sunday, Knutsson has been working tirelessly to arrange flights home for Swedes and to get the government to ship more medicine and send more airlifts to get the injured home. “Let Lottie Knutsson from Fritidsresor change places with Göran Persson,” one reader wrote to the Foreign Ministry. On Thursday, the headline of the daily Svenska Dagbladet screamed “Bring them home now,” referring to Swedes still stranded in Thailand.
It takes a disaster to bring home to many that their political elites, having sold their mess of pottage to Brussels, no longer subscribe to the notion that they are servants rather than masters.
Arthur C Clarke has stated via Jose Cordeiro, roving ambassador for the World Transhumanist Organisation, that he is safe and well. Here is his brief message on the catastrophe, including websites for providing aid in Sri Lanka.
I am enormously relieved that my family and household have escaped the ravages of the sea that suddenly invaded most parts of coastal Sri Lanka, leaving a trail of destruction.
But many others were not so fortunate. For over two million Sri Lankans and a large number of foreign tourists holidaying here, the day after Christmas turned out to be a living nightmare reminiscent of The Day After Tomorrow. My heart-felt sympathy goes out to all those who lost family members or friends.
Among those who directly experienced the waves were my staff based at our diving station in Hikkaduwa, and my holiday bungalows in Kahawa and Thiranagama all beachfront properties located in southern areas that were badly hit. Our staff members are all safe, even though some are badly shaken and relate harrowing first hand accounts of what happened. Most of our diving equipment and boats at Hikkaduwa were washed away. We still don’t know the full extent of damage — it will take a while for us to take stock as accessing these areas is still difficult.
This is indeed a disaster of unprecedented magnitude for Sri Lanka, which lacks the resources and capacity to cope with the aftermath. We are encouraging concerned friends to contribute to the relief efforts launched by various national and international organisations. If you wish to join these efforts, I can recommend two options.
– Contribute to a Sri Lanka disaster relief fund launched by an internationally operating humanitarian charity, such as Care or Oxfam.
– Alternatively, considering supporting Sarvodaya, the largest development charity in Sri Lanka, which has a 45-year track record in reaching out and helping the poorest of the poor. Sarvodaya has mounted a well organised, countrywide relief effort using their countrywide network of offices and volunteers who work in all parts of the country, well above ethnic and other divisions. Their website, www.sarvodaya.lk, provides bank account details for financial donations. They also welcome contributions in kind — a list of urgently needed items is found at: http://www.sarvodaya.lk/Inside_Page/urgently%20needed.htm
There is much to be done in both short and long terms for Sri Lanka to raise its head from this blow from the seas. Among other things, the country needs to improve its technical and communications facilities so that effective early warnings can help minimise losses in future disasters.
Curiously enough, in my first book on Sri Lanka, I had written about another tidal wave reaching the Galle harbour (see Chapter 8 in The Reefs of Taprobane, 1957). That happened in August 1883, following the eruption of Krakatoa in roughly the same part of the Indian Ocean.
Arthur Clarke
29 December 2004
The call centre, known as the Casualty Bureau Appeal Centre, that the FCO established to take calls from concerned relatives or friends, has taken flak as many have found that they were unable to get through to the operators.
But Sri Lankan national Ivan Corea, chief executive of the Dream Harvest Group, in Stratford, east London, said he had called repeatedly on Sunday without success.
“We have been trying to contact relatives in Sri Lanka, all lines are engaged,” he said.
Kevin Tunbridge, of Bury St Edmunds, in Suffolk, said he has had no contact with his son Luke, 20, or his son’s girlfriend Laura Blackman, 20, who are a coastal resort in south Thailand.
“I have tried to contact the Foreign Office and the Bangkok Embassy all day, but all I have reached is a recorded BT message. All we want is some information,” he said.
There is no doubt that FCO civil servants have been working in an emergency situation to provide those who do succeed in contacting them with the necessary information. However, accusations of understaffing and inadequate capacity have been levelled against the Foreign Office by the Conservative MP for Aldershot, Gerald Howarth, who has received complaints from his constituents.
The FCO has replied to criticisms by stating that they have had to field an unprecedented number of telephone calls including inappropriate inquiries concerning flights and travel advice. The unfriendly structure of their website may have contributed to this state of affairs.
Commander Ronald McPherson, who is in charge of the Hendon operation, said the volume of calls was among the highest levels they had experienced for a mass casualty incident, including September 11.
He said: “Since we opened, the lines have permanently been at capacity.”
Mr McPherson said staff were taking calls from people from anywhere in the world concerned about relatives or loved ones who were UK nationals.
A Foreign Office spokesman also stressed the system had been taking an unprecedented volume of calls, and said consular staff in Thailand were working through the night to answer inquiries.
Although this is an unprecedented situation, emergency call centres are supposed to deal with emergencies and it is noteworthy that McPherson stated that the Appeal Centre was “at capacity” rather than promising to “increase capacity”. Does this mean Buggins turn for those who have to wait on the line until they obtain an operator?
It is the FCO’s role to deal with situations such as this catastrophe. They have dropped the ball.
With a natural catastrophe of this proportion, it is clear that the whole region will be picking up the pieces for the foreseeable future. Death toll is now 10,000 and rising, depending upon your news site, and the emergency situation has been publicised for ten hours
The Foreign Secretary sent out the message of condolences and said “stand by for action“. However, there are no links or help on the Foreign and Commonwealth Office website for families to telephone or leave messages for family members or friends, holidaying in the tropics. Nothing on the State Department for US citizens either, although such aid may be dealt with at a local level. Australia is far better prepared with a hotline. The BBC, agitprop wing of the government, wishes to hear your experiences of the tsunami, but does not provide you with a number if you wish to let your loved ones know that you are still alive.
Especially as it is the holiday period, such emergencies are the time when government departments should place themselves at the service of their citizens. Should, but do not.
UPDATE: The FCO emergency telephone number is 0207 008 0000. However, if you wish to obtain more direct information on each country, you have to visit the ‘Travel Advice by Country’ pages on the FCO website. These will give you direct numbers for the embassies in individual countries: India, Indonesia, Thailand, Maldives, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Malaysia.
If you were to visit the frontispiece of the FCO website, there is still no indication where such information is held. The BBC does not hold this information on its indepth webpage concerning the disaster. Both the BBC and Skynews tuck the number away at the bottom of their webpages reporting the deaths of Britons.
As the unrelieved gloom surrounding freedom in the UK becomes too much to bear, here is a recommendation for all of those who wish to celebrate the diversity of snackdom before the health fascists force us all to eat lentils and turnips.
Visit snackspot and track down all of those arcane foods such as Gummi Zone Gummi Pizza before they are banned by the edict of Nanny Blair.
Once 1989 had passed, the West assumed that communism had lost its power and would trouble vast areas of the globe. Its effects were confined to a few reactionary holdouts such as Cuba or Corin Redgrave and within a few years Soviet symbols had moved from shock to chic. Even the last of the totalitarian movements, the Sendero Luminoso of Peru, had been smashed.
Yet, despite this process of forgetting, it appears that the twenty-first century may witness self-styled revolutionary movements establishing dictatorships of the proletariat and peasants. The most vulnerable country is Nepal and it is disheartening to read of peasants rising up against their communist oppressors.
However, the Maoists have also received several setbacks in recent weeks. People living in 12 village development committee areas in the Dullu region – a heavily Maoist affected villages 600 kilometers west of capital – revolted against the rebels. The uprising began after the Maoists started forcibly recruiting full-time cadres. More than 20,000 people spontaneously organized a rally in the areas denouncing Maoist atrocities.
The Nepalese Maoists, masking their plans behind a demand for a constituent assembly, pose as would-be democrats whilst terrorising the areas of the country that they control. Recalling the fate of the Socialist Revolutionaries in 1918, one would hold out little hope of a Nepalese ‘Constituent Assembly’ holding power.
Yet even graver is the rapid spread of the Maoist ‘Naxalite’ insurgency in India which has spread to nearly half of the country under the apathetic eyes of the government. These Maoists are linked to the Nepalese party and, by employing the same tactics, hope to enjoy similar success. This increase in political risk threatens the future of India since investment shies away from countries threatened by war or terrorism.
Despite the miserable weather, a reasonable audience turned up at Conway Hall in Holborn to listen to Aubrey de Grey, at the monthly meeting of Extrobritannia. The speaker sounded as if his life was already ebbing away, given the fast bullets assigned to each argument. Powerpoint presentations are far less interesting.
Aubrey de Grey campaigns for practical approaches to anti-aging medicine, and uses the acronym SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence). He is one of the few people on the planet actively attempting to help the general population live longer and healthier lives. As he argues, one without the other is pointless.
One of the strategies for promoting this goal is the Methuselah Prize, a reward designed for prestige rather than money, which will (hopefully) promote philanthropic investment in these research programmes. To those familiar with this structure, this is designed to emulate the success of the X Prize.
The talk today included the recent changes in the structure of this Prize. There are two components: an award for postponing the aging process and an award for reversal. The aim is to award those resaerchers that succeed in extending the lifespan of the laboratory mouse and, even better, reversing the aging process.
The goal of capturing the imagination of the public is best achieved by a very simple prize structure, in which money is awarded simply to the producer of the world’s oldest ever mouse. This should be restricted to the species used in virtually all laboratory work, Mus musculus , but no other restrictions should be placed on the way in which the mouse’s lifespan is extended, except for ones that fail to maintain its cognitive and/or physical well-being. This is analogous to the situation with boxing, for example: the heavyweight championship is the one that gets by far the most publicity and money.
A major shortcoming of this simple structure exists, however. Our main purpose is to find interventions which are effective when initiated at a late age; it is very likely that interventions that are applied throughout life will always be ahead of those initiated late.
Hence, we are running two prize competitions:
– a “Longevity Prize” (LP) for the oldest-ever Mus musculus ;
– a “Rejuvenation Prize” (RP) for the best-ever late-onset intervention.
Although the United States and Europe have placed cultural and regulatory obstacles in the path of longevity science, cutting edge research continues to take place in the Far East. Only yesterday did South Korean researchers claim that the injection of umbilical cord stem cells had allowed a woman paralysed from the waist down to walk again. The question on concerned minds: can this result be reproduced?
These scientific goals are no longer the dreams of writers; they are the goals of academics and the content of research programmes. This is all progress. Faster please!
Do you remember all of those science fiction movies where air taxis would soar across the skyline taking paying customers from highrise to highrise? Neither do I but air cars were included in the visions of the future that the twentieth century popularised. That future is now creeping up on us.
A firm in the United Kingdom called Avcen has developed a short take off and landing prototype called the Jetpod.
Mike Dacre, Avcen’s Managing Director, says “We are expecting a great deal of interest from around the world in this unique form of localised air transportation.”
The Jetpod T-100 air taxi and the P-100 personal transpeeder can operate quietly in tiny city-centre landing sites that will be one tenth of the length normally required, thereby opening up cities to true pay-on-demand, free-roaming air taxis.
This is preferable to the train or tube and could prove the disruptive technology that ends New York’s taxi licence cartel.
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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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