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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Snow in London last night. The BBC news report I just watched (having come home past the BBC’s television studios which were covered in the white stuff) mentioned it on the East coast of England, but no mention of it in London.
For those not familiar with London weather, the last time I can find when snow was even claimed here this early in the autumn was 1974. One eyewitness suggested it was really hailstones. I don’t remember. All I know is that today, October 28 2008 is the earliest proper winter that I can record.
Now here’s where it gets interesting. Only a few weeks ago, we were hearing that South Africa had snow, and not just that, but of the very late variety (South of the Equator, this time of year should be warming). But don’t worry, we must have a flexible view of reality: when it gets hot, it’s warming; when it gets cold, it’s warming; and when it seems to stay the same, it’s warming twice as fast.
Does global warming predict the weather right now? Only in the sense that Nostradamus predicted the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II in the 1985 edition, and the fall of the Shah of Iran in the 1980 edition.
What does predict the weather we’re having is the sunspot cycle and we can now add some idea of what reduced solar wind does. [Hat tip, Instapundit]
Here’s a somewhat better forecast of the end of 2008’s weather than anything cooked up by the “capitalism causes tsunamis” crowd. Farmer’s Almanac? Maybe astrology is more scientific than the ecofascists.
Jonathan Ross has not followed his own advice. His new book is entitled “Why do I say these things”. How apt!
Perhaps he should employ a chimpanzee as a personal censor. Especially when his foolishness focused upon a member of the satanic sluts. I would not dare to cross them.
I am a sovereign wealth fund. This is a position that I never expected to be in. I and every other British taxpayer.
I have been told that this was necessary or indescribable consequences entailing the destruction of my life and welfare would have followed. This hypothesis was not tested, due to the supposed costs, and, therefore, I became a sovereign wealth fund.
This sovereign wealth fund is not like other sovereign wealth funds, in that the Chairman is one Gordon Brown and the money that he uses to purchase whatever assets he likes is mine. This does not give me confidence, and I suspect the wealth in the fund will decline in value. This is what Gordon Brown does.
There will be a shareholders meeting in 2010. I think we need to vote for a return of all assets to the shareholders. Voting for these managers certainly has not worked and the alternative consultancy offers more of the same.
I have always regarded Lloyd’s List as hard-packed with hard fact (as about the most expensive newspaper by weight you are likely to find anywhere, it should be). But can this really be true?
British Foreign Office officials are understood to have advised the Royal Navy not to confront or arrest pirates in the region [the horn of Africa] for fear of transgressing human rights legislation or encouraging their seeking asylum once taken to the UK.
If such advice is followed, it seems there is precious little reason left to even have a Royal Navy.
Hat-tip: The Register
Peter Tatchell, selling Green policy under the guise of giving advice to the PM, has a number of suggestions. One of them fully restores the Green Party’s reputation for plain weirdness:
Raise tax-free personal allowances from £6,035 to £8,000 for people earning under £20,000 a year and to £7,000 for those earning £20,000 to £25,000, which would be funded by a rise in tax on incomes over £80,000 and which would assist the lower-paid at a time of rocketing food prices.
That top limit of £25,000 implies he’s leaving personal allowances where they are for people earning over £25,000, so that they drop by £1,000, twice. Lots of people, including me, have suggested reshaping the tax system by raising allowances. But no-one I think has before suggested that it would be a vote-winner openly to treat very large numbers of people to marginal rates over 100% by clawing back an extra £200 when they cross an arbitrary threshold. Twice. At close to the median earnings level so the maximum numbers notice.
In fact, it was a disaster for Gordon Brown when he did it as a concealed one-time-only adjustment. Possibly it was the disaster for Gordon Brown, where he finally came unstuck. It’s probably not something he wants to try again once, Peter. Let alone twice.
Probably it is the whole world I do not understand, but I am going to stick to not grasping it a bit at a time. It seems less daunting.
How does this work? Some commentators are saying that Senator McCain picked Governor Palin as his running-mate in order to attract supporters of Senator Clinton who are cross with Senator Obama for not giving up when he was winning the Democratic nomination.
Just who is crazy here? The Clintonites who think Obama is such a middle-of-the-road disaster for failing to appeal to the activist base that they might consider voting for a party that is over the other side of the road? And having done so, I look forward to their saying is the racism of the American public not Democratic-party petulance that has kept him out of the Whitehouse. Or the super-Clintonites who say they are mad at Obama for not being a woman? Republican strategists (if they exist) who care about what the tiny number of leftist Democratic activists think, but nevertheless think Palin will attract them, despite her being of the religious right persuasion and ideologically about as far from a leftist Democratic activist as possible? Or the commentators who assert such a strategy would make sense?
Or are there really large numbers of Americans who will vote for McCain solely because Palin is female and for no other reason of policy, personality or competence dividing the candidates and their platforms? That would be crazy. Wouldn’t it?
This morning’s superstrangeness:
Ministers are being urged to stop faith schools in England selecting pupils and staff on the basis of their religion.
Accord, a new coalition of secular and religious figures, wants the government to stop state-funded schools engaging in what they say is “discrimination”.
As an atheist I find a lot of things to do with religious faith incomprehensible, so maybe I’m missing something that’s obvious to a believer, but in what way is a school with no religious requirements of pupils or teachers a “faith school”?
I’m sure that Hugo Chavez has done some good. Much more bad than good probably, but some good. And Ken Livingstone is certainly not totally evil. But when the two of them get together it is very implausible that it is good news for the world on average.
Though if Mr Livingstone spends a lot of time in Venezuela, that will be pleasant both for him and for Londoners, I am really quite puzzled what Latin America, or even Mr Chavez, gets from this deal:
Ken Livingstone, the former mayor of London, has found a new role as an adviser to the Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez and his political allies. During a surprise visit to Caracas, Livingstone said yesterday that he would act as a consultant on the capital’s policing, transport and other municipal issues.
“I believe that Caracas will become a first-world city in 20 years. I have a very extensive network of contacts both domestically and internationally which I will be calling on to assist in this,” he told reporters at the presidential palace after meeting Chávez.
But the most puzling thing of all is that use of the phrase “first-world city”. I was under the impression that the ‘first world’ was the capitalist western countries, the ‘second world’ the realm of state-socialism, and the ‘third world’ the unindustrialised rest, not clearly part of either. Continuing the metaphor of separate worlds – and wishing away trade and travel and telegraph – the Rev John Papworth has even coined “Fourth World” for the poorest of the poor and those rejecting economic development altogether.
I cannot believe Red Ken was trying to suggest that the Bolivarian Revolution will fail, and that in 20 years Venezuela will be fully part of the capitalist first world again. Surely Mr Livingstone means he wants Caracas to be a second-world city?
It may be disgustingly authoritarian, but it is risibly incompetent too. It appears the Home Office has just spent a very large amount of UK readers’ money making a vast online advertisement for NO2ID. We’d despaired of reaching ‘the youth’ ourselves, too expensive. I’m very glad they decided to do it for us.
With audience participation. Which embarrassingly for the Home Office shows ‘kids’ not to be quite the suckers they’d hoped. Enjoy.
I have spent twelve of the last sixteen years of my life living as a foreign citizen in the United Kingdom. I have spent this time on a mixture of student visas, the “UK ancestry” visa (which allows citizens of Commonwealth countries with a British grandparent to live and work in the UK) and for the last two and a half years as a permanent resident (or with “Indefinite Leave to Remain”, as the British immigration jargon has it). My immigration status has always been pretty uncontroversial, I have never been a drain on the resources of British taxpayers (quite the opposite, given the taxes I have paid). This has not stopped the Home Office from insisting that I jump through a whole variety of bureaucratic hoops, answer a large number of impertinent questions, and suffer an assortment of petty humiliations with a fair amount of regularity. The level of competence of the Home Office in administering all this has never been high – when I was studying at Cambridge, it was well understood that the usual way of renewing a student visa involved sending your passport to the Home Office, and then applying to your country’s embassy a few months later to replace a lost passport before making a quick trip to France to get your paperwork processed at the border on the way back – but in recent times (the start of which coincides quite closely with the Labour Party coming to power) the frequency with which hoops must be jumped has increased and the fees that must be paid to jump through each hoop have become ever higher.
However, last week, my need to deal with the Immigration and Nationality Directorate of the Home Office came to an end. At an in truth rather touching ceremony at Wandsworth Town Hall, I affirmed my allegiance to Queen Elizabeth the Second and was naturalised a British citizen. This does not affect my Australian citizenship, and I now have dual nationality. A couple of days later, I did what most new citizens do fairly quickly, and sent off an application for a British passport. The fee that is payable in this instance is not nearly as high as that payable when renewing an immigrant visa these days, but must none the less be paid. The passport application form came with another form on which I could fill out credit card details to pay the fee. The form stated that I could check the current fees on the website of a different section of the Home Office, the recently renamed Identity and Passport Service, or that I could alternately leave the amount blank on the form. The amount of the fee is not printed anywhere on either of the forms: this presumably makes it easier for the Home Office to increase the fees repeatedly without the trouble of reprinting forms. If I did this, the Home Office would charge the correct amount to my credit card and there would be no delays due to the possibility of my incorrectly sending the wrong amount. I therefore left this blank. On Tuesday, I noted that the approximate amount that I expected had been charged to my credit card, and I was set to receive my new passport within a couple of weeks.
However, yesterday I received a letter stating that my passport application could not be processed because I had not paid the correct fee, and this would not be done until I sent an additional £3. What apparently happened was that someone received my form, filled in an incorrect amount, and then somebody else noted that I had paid the incorrect amount and sent a letter to me demanding more money. If I had filled in the form with the correct amount in the first place, this would not apparently have happened. I was able to rectify this today by calling the enquiry line of the Identity and Passport Service, explaining the situation, and giving them my credit card details again so I could be charged the additional £3. My passport will hopefully still come in a couple of weeks, but it has been delayed by this and I have been inconvenienced. The enquiry line was an 0870 number, for which the charges are high and the called party receives a portion of the charge for the call, so I have paid a small amount of additional money for this, too.
This is all mildly amusing, but there is perhaps a moral. Theoretically, when I became a citizen, one thing I gained was the right not to suffer the petty humiliations and bureaucratic hassles and incompetence from the Home Office that a non-citizen goes through just to live here. I would personally argue that such humiliations and hassles are no more justified in the treatment of non-citizens than they are in the treatment of citizens, but the population as a whole does not generally seem to agree with me, and politicians seem to believe that there are electoral points to be gained in actually increasing and enforcing such hassles.
Or perhaps not. Perhaps this is just a demonstration of the nature of our government and our bureaucrats. It is not hard to see the ID card as little more than a way to extend the humiliations and hassles that non-citizens receive to the time after people become citizens, and to extend them to the native born as well. The Home Office body that will implement and enforce the ID card and associated database is of course the Identity and Passport Service. It is not terribly encouraging that my first interaction with this Service after becoming a citizen involved their making an error for which they blamed me, charged me, and inconvenienced me, even though I had done everything correctly. I suspect we should all get used to it.
Sometimes the internet opens one’s eyes to whole new ways of seeing the world. A fabulous comment over on David Davis’s semi-blog (no permalink I could see, under “Sky News Debate with Tony McNulty”):
David Davis doesn’t want a real debate on the Orwellian State – he wants a controlled one that’s only on his terms with safe people like Tony Benn and Bob Geldof.
As a current resident of Beijing, my social life is already being affected by the slew of new rules and bylaws raining down upon the citizens of this city to best ensure that the upcoming Olympic Games is “safe” and – more importantly – free of episodes that might embarrass the notoriously thin-skinned government of China. Consequently, less easily controlled events in celebration of the Olympics such as street parties, spontaneous parades and other assorted manifestations of public revelry have all been banned. According to a BOCOG website, restaurants, bars and clubs will be subject to a 2am curfew. Even establishments that usually set up tables and chairs on footpaths for patrons to enjoy their food and drink in the balmy evenings have been forbidden from doing so this summer. Considering the above, I can reasonably confidently predict that if the Olympics goes off without a hitch, this colossally expensive event will be the most boring in living memory. Still, at least the fun-deprived foreign visitors will have something to snigger at:
 Dinky little machine guns: check. Shiny gold targets on helmets to give opponents something to aim at: check. Segways: check, baby, and welcome to the future. Look out, bad guys – here comes the recently unveiled and Segway-straddled Chinese anti-terror/crowd control unit, charged with protecting the Olympic Games from universally acknowledged threats, as well as those that keep only CCP apparatchiks awake at night. Judging by the way China’s finest are handling their weapons in this photo, however, they look to be more of a danger to each other than to anyone not behaving.
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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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