Thursday, December 05, 2002

The man who prefers his country before any other duty duty shows the same spirit as the man who surrenders every right to the state. They both deny that right is superior to authority.
- Lord John Acton

Last night I needed to make a tube journey, but the combination of ticket machines unwilling to take notes and ticket booths without staff meant that having arrived at my local tube station I had to leave it again and buy something - anything - just to get some change. Annoying. But the thing I did buy, a copy of yesterday's Times, did contain a couple of valuable items. There was a deeply scary story about how Germany is going to hell in a handcart, by Rosemary Righter. And there was this letter to the Editor, which put the policies of the European Union in an even more negative light:

Poland and the EU

From Mr Rodney E. B. Atkinson

Sir, I have just returned from a book promotion in Poland, where even those MPs who had been in the forefront of opposition to the Communists told me that they found the EU far more oppressive and dismissive of Polish nationhood than their previous Soviet masters.

Laws were being forced through the Polish Parliament, at the behest of the EU, which had never appeared in any party manifesto, with little debate and which were not yet even law in the existing EU member states.

Perhaps the most insidious new provision in the Polish Constitution is that a law can be enforced in Poland even if it has not been translated into Polish. There can be no more disgraceful indicator of the true nature of the European Union as it constitutionally imprisons nations which so recently escaped from a different tyranny.

Yours etc,

RODNEY E. B. ATKINSON,
Alderley,
Meadowfield Road,
Stocksfield,
Northumberland NE43 7PZ.

December 3.

It was the last paragraph that got me. I hope that gets bounced around the blogosphere. It deserves to.

Not me, that is for sure. Even harder to figure out is the film going public... and after a chat with Hollywood film producer and blogger Brian Linse the other day, I get the impression from him that even Hollywood cannot figure out the film going public.

Take two movies, both based on computer games. Firstly, Tomb Raider, staring Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft.

Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft: striking a Lara-ish stance

The Tomb Raider series of computer games were massive and more or less redefined the genre. I though they were all quite splendid and am very eager to get my paws on the latest episode of Lara Croft's adventures, Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness.

Angel of Darkness: Lara Croft in all her pixellated glory!

As you might expect, I was rather keen to see Tomb Raider: The Movie, directed by Simon West. It had everything going for it: Angelina Jolie is an interesting looking woman and without doubt a technically skilled actress. Although she is not quite ready to challenge Gwyneth Paltrow for her crown as 'Best-Yank-Actress-who-can-do-a-perfect-British-accent', she is pretty damn good nonetheless.

The film clearly had a truly humongous budget, was adequately acted and tolerably directed in parts (with a couple startlingly bad scenes: it takes a certain perverse skill for a director to make a gratuitous shower scene with Angelina Jolie laughable for all the wrong reasons). Unfortunately the story line was weak, convoluted and confusing. Worst of all, the production was dire: it was almost as if it was three separate movies, casually spliced together, differently paced as if styled by three sets of completely unconnected film makers, then finally so badly edited as to make some parts of the story incomprehensible. Although Tomb Raider: The Movie was not utterly without merits, the overall effect was shockingly disappointing.

And yet, due to the Tomb Raider/Lara Croft brand name and massive marketing, this clunker rode out the appropriately scathing reviews and was by no means a commercial failure in spite of costing a great deal to make. A sequel is in the pipeline.

And then let us look as the second movie, Resident Evil staring Milla Jovovich as Alice.

Milla Jovovich as Alice: about to demonstrate how unhappy she is with her ex-boyfriend

The game that the movie is based on, similarly called Resident Evil is a big name in the Playstation console world, but it does not have anything like the brand recognition of 'Tomb Raider' and 'Lara Croft' with the general public.

Killer pixels: Veronica from the Resident Evil - Code V game

The Resident Evil movie, directed by Paul Anderson, clearly has a far smaller budget, it was marketed poorly to put it mildly and with the exception of Milla Jovovich (Fifth Element, Zoolander, Blue Lagoon, Two Moon Junction etc.) had a cast of more or less unknowns. Resident Evil had a simple but nearly flawlessly executed story, was artfully directed, skillfully produced and very atmospheric. It was well cast and Milla was excellent as the killer amnesiac conspirator known simply as 'Alice'... and unlike the jarring T&A scene in Tomb Raider, the opening shower sequence with dazed Milla worked perfectly, setting the deliciously ill-at-ease tone for the whole movie.

In short, this movie rocks... vastly superior to 'Tomb Raider: The Movie' on every level. It has no pretensions to be high art or intellectually challenging, but it does exactly what it sets out to do with considerable flair.

And yet unlike the dismal Tomb Raider, Resident Evil almost immediately vanished off the screens and onto video/DVD. Fortunately, because it cost so little to make, the picture seems to have still made a profit and thus in this case too, a sequel is in the pipeline called Resident Evil: Nemesis (which will no doubt cause confusion with the impending Star Trek movie called 'Nemesis'). Movie making is a very strange business.

Go out and buy or rent Resident Evil: The Movie on DVD or Video, it is destined to be a cult classic. Avoid Tomb Raider: The Movie like it was smallpox.

Sean Gabb's account of the debate he took part in yesterday evening, already referred to here (and assuming that yesterday is the proper word for the day that only ended a little over an hour ago), is already up and readable on his own website. The full text of what he said is there, together with his account of some other things he said during the Q&A. Recommended.

The titbit in the report of the evening that interested me most was somewhat off the central agenda. It seems that after the debate, which all went very smoothly and politely by the way, Sean was challenged in a rather interesting way by a young woman in the audience:

She began with flattery. She was a reader, she said, of Free Life Commentary on my web page and found it very interesting. The surest way to an intellectual's heart is though his ego. This young lady will doubtless go far in life. She then asked why I was spending so much of my time on the mixed bag of losers and cretins who are the modern Conservative Party? Why not turn my attentions to the Liberal Democrats? These at least were already social liberals, and they might with a fraction of the effort I had wasted on the Tories come to some agreement on economic liberalism. Good question, and I had no ready answer. Perhaps I should think of one.

Yes do, Sean. I for one would love to hear it.

In this connection, our American readers in particular would surely appreciate some explanation of the parlous state that Britain's Conservatives now find themselves in, especially when you consider how well the Republicans are now doing over there. Why is the political right that in such a mess here, while it is the left that is in trouble in the USA? I hope to offer a few answers to this question in a future Samizdata posting, but I have learned from bitter experience over the decades that what I say that I hope to do, and what I do do, are two things that often diverge with embarrassing completeness. So expect that when you read it and no sooner.

I cannot even hope to offer much on the subject of the Lib Dems, the young lady's proposed alternative focus of Sean Gabb's attention. Recently someone told me that there are clever young people in their ranks who are not completely indifferent to the claims of economic liberalism. Until then I despised the Liberal Democrats utterly, and had as little to do with them, and even with thinking about them, as I could contrive. But maybe they might make something approximating to libertarians some time reasonably soon. They're already very sound about cannabis. And they are descended from the nineteenth century Liberal Party of William Gladstone. In the 1950s there were still old-fashioned Liberals like Jo Grimmond to be found among them, before they succumbed to the statism Mark 2 posture that they have adopted for the last forty years or so. Comments anybody?

Paul Staines reports on the latest rather splendid twist in the ongoing German anti-tax protests about which Adriana first reported last month on Samizdata.net

There is a brilliant story at wired news about a tax protest with a difference. It started as a wacky idea in an Internet chat-room but now thousands of Germans have sent Chancellor Schroeder their shirts. Schroeder has donated the thousands of shirts his office has received to charity. Shame he does not show some charity towards taxpayers...

The political campaign is being promoted with this rather fetching picture of Katja Kassin in the process of losing her shirt! Who says the Germans do not have a sense of humour?

Paul Staines

Wednesday, December 04, 2002

Reader Peter Carayiannis alerted Samizdata to a story in Canada's National Post. The Post reports that costs for Canada's gun registry have overrun by a factor of 500. No, that's not an overrun of 500% (which would be bad enough) but a final cost of five hundred times the original estimate. Did I say final? I meant cost so far; it's not final yet.

Well, at least Canadians are safe now. Only they're not. He adds:

"Herewith is another example of why gun registration programs don't work. Canada has a history different from the US with respect to firearms (which explains, in large part, why this became law in the first place). I think that violent, gun-related crime in Canada's urban centers has probably increased since 1995 (but I don't have any hard evidence to support this assertion). I can say that, in Toronto, there was a series of gang related shooting in October where every weekend (for a month) different gang members ended up dead in different parts of the city. Further to this, the gun control law has had no impact on the Hell's Angels in Montreal."

As chance would have it I had posted earlier today about how Simon Jenkins of the Times should not believe all that Michael Moore says about Canada being a paradise of trust. Moore is right about one thing. America does have an anomalously high murder rate. But all the strategies put in place by countries who boast that their lower murder rate is the result of gun control, and that they therefore need more of it, keep on failing. Expensively.

That would have been a good sign-off line, but I've one more thing to say. I was struck by the sentiments of Allan Rock, a Liberal Party bigshot who the opposition attacked for keeping mum about the spiralling costs of the gun registry. The report said:

Mr. Rock defended the registry, saying it has "saved lives" and reinforced "Canadian values" by distinguishing Canada from the United States on the issue of gun control.

Were his actual words as thin and shabby as this paraphrase implies? Does he really see mere difference to the United States as a merit in itself?

Paul Marks has seen spotted the true historical template for Tony Blair...

For some time now I have been puzzled by the fact that although Mr Blair has followed 'left wing' policies of ever more government spending, taxes and regulations he is widely seen as "free market", "really a Conservative", "very right wing" and so on.

I must stress that not only the 'usual suspects' (Marxists and other such) have used such language, but quite a few pro-free market and even libertarian people.

What I have tried to do is find people in history who have followed statist policies and still got a reputation as free market folk.

President Hoover comes fairly close. Herbert Hoover, as Commerce Secretary in the 1920's, worked endlessly to increase the budget and powers of his department and showered President Harding and President Coolidge with bad advise (which, thankfully, they mostly ignored - indeed President Coolidge is supposed to have said "no one has given me more advise than Herbert Hoover - and all of it bad advise"),

As President, Herbert Hoover went along with big tariff increases and demanded that large companies keep up wage rates at a time when both prices and output were falling (thus ensuring vast unemployment) - and yet Herbert Hoover ("The Forgotten Progressive") is widely seen as the free market man that President Roosevelt reacted against.

However, President Hoover was faced with the worst depression in American history (caused by a credit-money boom that he had nothing to do with creating) - and this is likely to warp the judgement of most men. Also Herbert Hoover was a man of strict honesty in his dealings with businessmen - which does not fit in with the cozy image (however false it may be, my dear libel lawyers) of Mr Blair and those known (however wrongly) as his friends.

I think that I have found a closer match for Mr Blair - someone who may indeed have served as a role model for him.

Louis Phillippe "King of the French" from 1830 to 1848:

Louis Phillippe was a 'People's King' rather than 'King of France' you see, the son of the Duke of Orleans. His father had helped finance the French revolution and voted for the execution of his kinsman King Louis XVI, and has himself later been executed by his own comrades. Louis Phillippe came to power after a strong media campaign had helped whip up public hatred for King Charles X.

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Sean Gabb will tonight be speaking at a debate - "This House Believes Promoting Diversity Causes Discrimination" is what he will be arguing - organised by the Local Government Association. (Sorry, I realise now that he didn't say where this would be.) He has been circulating the proposed text of his speech to other Libertarian Alliance people, and I can therefore (and with his permission, given by phone this afternoon) tell you the kind of thing he'll be saying:

I will begin by questioning the notion of diversity. What does it mean? As commonly used, it means that we should work for the sort of society in which every organisation, public and private, is filled with representative numbers of women, black people, homosexuals, and the handicapped. Anything with less than representative numbers of these and other groups is to be investigated on the grounds that it is probably discriminating. In describing the ideal society according to this view of diversity, the old sneer about jobs for black, one-legged lesbians is not that unfair.

Now, this is a diversity of sorts. But it is not the diversity that really exists when not as carefully managed and constrained as a bonsai tree. This is the diversity that concentrates on superficial differences between individuals. When it comes to matters of opinion, there is no diversity. Everyone is expected - in public, at least - to endorse the kind of opinions that would not be out of place in a Guardian editorial. Let there be diversity of belief - let someone say the number of black people in this country has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished; or that America is the Great Satan, and got a jolly good hiding in New York last year, and should mind its ps and qs over the Middle East in future if it wants to avoid more of the same; or that homosexuals are the spawn of Satan, and aids is only the beginning of God's punishment for their abominations - let anyone deviate from the Guardian line on any issue dear to the promoters of diversity, and there is an end of talk about diversity. The cry will go up for sackings from employment, for police and security service harassment, and of course for censorship laws with criminal sanctions attached. Promoters of diversity as the word is commonly used are inclined to tolerate only the diversity of which they approve. Where they do not approve, they will happily manufacture excuses for hate crime laws as arbitrary and soon perhaps as draconian as the religious laws of Elizabeth I.

That, I suspect, is the diversity promoted by the Local Government Association. …

Sean tells me that he intends soon to write a report of how this all went, in his Free Life Commentaries series, hopefully tomorrow.

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The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else
- Frederic Bastiat

Thousands of British students have gathered in London today in order to protest against a Government proposal to introduce university top-up fees. Coming from across the UK, they started marching at noon today (I am pleased to report it is pissing down with rain) in protest against a Government plan to require students to pay for at least some of their own university education. The protestors are backed by trade unionist and assorted socialist groups, who are claiming 20,000 students are marching. Police have said there are closer to 10,000 present.

Mandy Telford, president of the National Union of Students (NUS), said: "Education should be based on your ability not your ability to pay. Going down that road is putting a price tag on degrees and that's not positive for society."

Society? It is not 'society' which takes money from one group of people by force and gives it to another, only the state (or organised crime) can do that to whole sections of the population by force. If students are entitled to take other people's money in order to educate themselves, and the object of this education being to benefit themselves, why not also for food? For housing? For petrol? For clothing? In fact, why should they need to pay for anything from which they benefit? It seems they do indeed want that invidious form of outright theft called progressive taxation to fund the priorities of others and of course students are just the thin end of the paleo-socialist wedge being offered up here.

Ms Telford [of the National Union of Students] said students were converging on London from across the country. She said: "The march will send a very clear message to ministers. Students are angry and their families are angry.

Well I am bloody angry too! These 'protestors' are nothing more than parasites calling for the state to continue to engage in theft on their behalf. What makes their needs and priorities so much more important than mine that they feel they have the right to take my money for their benefit? Well up your, you scruffy leeches... you will get very little from me. Any future business of mine will be off-shore benefiting someone else's economy, and 10,000 of the reasons are marching through London today.

It was futile to argue with politicians, I realized, to try to persuade them that your scepticism concerning their views might be well founded. Politicians developed habits of self-justification and certitude which were immune to logic or emotion: their rhetoric was like a blanket which they wrapped around themselves to keep out the bracing air of dissent.
- Princess Catherine, in Aztec Century by Christopher Evans

Tuesday, December 03, 2002

According to Carlton Vogt unless you have been living in a cave, you're aware of the Pentagon's Total Information Awareness (TIA) programme. My cave has an internet connection so I can blog about it eventually. Although the news about it has already been round the blogosphere I liked Mr Vogt's article.

The goal of TIA is to accumulate every bit of transactional online data worldwide and use data mining techniques to provide intelligence information. This means TIA will give the Pentagon access to your credit card data, school records, medical information, travel history, church affiliation, gun ownership, ammunition purchases, library records, video rentals, you name it:

"This will all be collected into a database, the purpose of which is ostensibly to fight terrorism, but which will present a massive opportunity for government abuse. There comes a point in almost every science fiction "B" movie where someone suggests that the new invention can be beneficial, but will be dangerous if "it falls into the wrong hands."

The problem is that this technology has not only fallen into the wrong hands, it was conceived by "the wrong hands." The chief architect of this new data gathering and mining scheme is none other than John Poindexter:

"Those who are old enough will remember him from the arms-for-hostages scandal, in which many of the arms currently threatening us in the Middle East were illegally traded to Iran by the Reagan administration.

Poindexter subsequently was convicted of several felonies, including conspiracy, perjury, and obstruction of justice. The convictions were later overturned on a technicality. The disgraced former admiral re-entered public life this year as a civilian Pentagon employee."

InfoWorld deals mainly with computer and technology related news or issues. It was most encouraging to read the following analysis by one of the senior editors in his regular column Ethics Matters:

"We are in the midst of vast fundamental changes in the body of rights, legal and moral, that we have taken for granted for so long. I am constantly amazed at how passively most people have accepted these changes, which will affect the way we live and work. It is a dangerous path on which false beginnings and missteps along the way can end in disaster.

If we scroll down to the bottom line, we find that the TIA project places too much information on too many people into the hands of too few people with too little oversight. It portends disaster.

...We have the opportunity to put the brakes on here before the situation becomes that grave. Perhaps it's time for people to shake off their post-9/11 stupor and find out what mischief is being done under the guise of fighting terrorism. You may not like what you see."

Absolutely. The state is not your friend.

I don't recall ever having reproduced an article in full on this blog and, only on the rare occasion, will I publish a letter in full. This is one such occasion and the quality of the letter merits it:

Modern changes ignore old gun laws

"Sir - Alan Judd is hesitant to advocate a "firearms free-for-all" (Comment, Dec 2), but one might recall that, before the First World War, when almost any British citizen could possess and carry any gun without a licence (and frequently did so, for there was a massive domestic firearms industry), armed crime in London ran at only two per cent of what it is today.

In 1946, the year the Home Office first moved against the licensing of pistols for self-defence, there were only 25 armed robberies in London: today, we have more than that every fortnight.

Confusion over our right to self-defence has not arisen because, as Mr Judd at one point suggests, we have "renounced" that capability. It is a right enshrined in our central constitutional document, the Bill of Rights of 1689, which is still in force as statute law. The right to possess arms for self-defence was one of only two rights of the individual guaranteed by the Bill of Rights, and was indeed the ultimate surety of the subject's other liberties.

While it had been the Restoration disarmament of Protestants that provoked the arms provision of the Bill of Rights, the equal right of Catholics to self-defence was guaranteed in the same year, and case law upheld the right to bear arms for self-defence through to the 20th century.

When the first Firearms Act was introduced in 1920, it was recognised that the normal justification for owning a revolver was self-defence; it was only in 1946 that the Labour Home Secretary indicated that this would no longer necessarily be accepted as a good reason.

When the Home Office advised Lord Cullen, in the prelude to the pistol ban of 1997, that "as a matter of policy" British law did not permit the citizen any weapons for self-defence, it was therefore asserting a new policy without legal foundation that simply chose to ignore the Bill of Rights.

It is the text of a letter written to the Daily Telegraph by a gentleman called Richard Munday whom I know not but admire much, not just because he is correct, but also because he has not forgotten his heritage.

Unlike our political rulers and most of fellow citizens who have shed their birthright like dead skin in the headlong rush to serfdom. But despite having been so outrageously and cynically trampled underfoot the 1689 Bill of Rights is still the law of the land and it does, indeed, bestow on every citizen the right and ability to defend their life, liberty and property.

However, the Bill of Rights is an Act of Parliament and, since no parliament can bind its successors, it could easily be repealed by another Act of Parliament. The fact that it has not yet been so repealed is doubtless due to the Old Bill being more honoured in the breach than in the observance.

So dragging the glorious old Bill of Rights from its musty chest and waving it in the face of the policeman who will come to arrest you for exercising your rights is all very back-stiffening in theory and may earn your day in Court to shout your case. But, in practice, the merest hint of any such happening would spur HMG into passing a repealing Act which would sail smartly through the House of Glove Puppets with nary a whisper of dissent nor a turn of a single hair.

And that would be that. Back to square one.

Still, the publication of Mr.Munday's most righteous missive brings a twitch to my jowels. It proves that some people have not buckled to the maladies of crass hysteria and infantile paranoia. Some people remember what freedom really means and more and more of them are prepared to shout it from the rooftops.

I got a call yesterday from Tim Evans of CNE saying that the Libertarian Alliance is now listed at the Stockholm Network website. For a brief few hours yesterday afternoon, if the LA's hit counter is to be believed, the LA was getting more hits than Samizdata. So this is a plug for the Stockholm Network website. Thank you guys. If you want to learn about all those Free Market Institutes which now abound throughout Europe, this is the cyberplace to go.

Founded in 1997 in London and Stockholm, the Stockholm Network is a dynamic working group of European market-oriented think-tanks. We have two primary objectives: to build a wide network of pro-market policy specialists within Europe and to use that network to influence the future direction of European policy-making on issues of pan-European importance.

And that's what they are doing. The blogs are a very different proposition from operations like the Stockholm Network. People don't read the blogs to learn about Institutes, and to be steered towards amazingly long publications only in Acrobat format about European Fish Stocks - The Way Forward. They read blogs for fun, for daily ego massage and navel tickling. Nevertheless, if you want to spread ideas among the suit-wearing, fun-avoiding, core value adhearing, mission statement stating, movers, shakers, policy makers and action planners, this is all part of how you do it. You create virtual shopping malls of ideas and idea-mongers like this one, and help people to find whatever they want.

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Paul Marks poses a question about a a hypothetical character who seems strangely... familiar

What does one do about the growth of government leading to the collapse of society?

In the United States if one is a Democrat there is no problem - such a person does not tend to believe that the growth of government causes any damage so one can tax and spend with a happy heart (until the cannibals tear out that heart).

But what if one is a Republican? Not a Democrat by another name (like the absurd Major Bloomberg of New York City), but the sort of Republican who (whilst he may have no libertarian principles) dimly knows that an ever expanding government will cause harm to society (i.e. the web of social interactions between human beings).

Let us say that one is the sort of Republican who spent his years at Yale getting drunk (rather than being teacher's pet like his father), because he had enough sense to understand that what he was being taught was nonsense.

Well (if one is not a man of fanatical principle) one spouts off enough of the nonsense to get a "C average" (the lowest respectable grade), makes some networking contacts (that will prove of use later in life) and then goes off into the world.

Then say one becomes President of the United States (so one can not say "someone else will keep things going"), and faces a situation where defence spending (the only form of government spending that history shows is easy to cut) is going to go UP rather than down.

The "entitlement programs" (the Welfare State) continues to expand and society is under threat - so what do you do?

Perhaps you start by trying to find ways to "contract out" government activities, but (perhaps because you suspect there are no magic solutions to fiscal problems) you also announce that civilian government employees are going to get a 3.1 (rather than 4.1) percent pay increase this year - and justify it on "national security" grounds.

There will have to be many such moves if the United States is to be saved - but it is good to know that the President has some understanding (dim or not so dim) of the problem.

Paul Marks

A young black man can be murdered by a gang of white thugs at a bus stop¹. The result? Senior politicians and police in front of the cameras; public inquiries; new phrases such as 'institutional racism'; sweeping reforms; a trust set up to help others from 'similarly disadvantaged backgrounds'. A young white man gets murdered by a gang of four black men and a black woman in Lewisham, South East London; it makes a one-inch high column at the bottom of page two. Why?
- Ian Wells, London E18, today in readers' comments section of Metro newspaper (a daily distributed for free on the London Underground).

¹ = Reference to the murder of Stephen Lawrence.

Long before the Great Unwashed got it into their tiny minds to start smashing up city centres in protests about 'globalisation', there was a healthy trade in cultural memes going on between Britain and the USA.

Jazz music made the transatlantic crossing some time in the 1920's I believe, and took off so successfully in Britain that we began sending our own band-leaders, like Ray Noble, over to the States. The process was enhanced during World War II when US soldiers romanced British 'dames' to the tunes of Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller.

Post-war, America gave us Elvis and, a few years later, we launched a British invasion of the USA spearheaded by the Beatles.

But it wasn't just a trade in popular music. Thanks to that engine of global cultural hegemony, Hollywood, American speech idioms also found their way into British culture. Whilst some British pundits sneered contemptuously at all these 'ghastly Americanisms', they were unable to stop Brits picking up terms like 'ballpark figure' or 'okay, I'm outta here'.

The stalwarts who vainly attempted to arrest this process were misguided. Since language is one of the few aspects of life that is not controlled by the government, it is a free market of terms and idioms and many Brits casually adopted American expressions that they found to be more expressive and colourful than their own and seamlessly weaved them into their everyday conversations. That's how choice works and I'm all for it.

But, alongside (or possibly, underneath) this healthy cultural cross-fertilisation is an equally lively, but rather less celebrated, trade in obscenities. I remember clearly back in about 1975 when an American boy at my school used the term 'motherf*cker'. We were so shocked. It was quite the rudest thing we'd ever heard. But, since then, it has duly taken it's place in the British lexicon of pre-fight insults.

Of course, it is encumbent on us Brits to return the favour by bestowing upon our American cousins an etymological treasure of our own. I am delighted to be able to say that it appears that we have done so.

On my journey's around blogland, I came across Rachel Lucas, a 'gun-totin' anti-idiot from Texas (and you can't get more American than that, surely) who has a category on her blog called 'Liberals and other Wankers'.

Seeing it made me grin from ear to ear because she uses the term with such casual aplomb and without a word of explanation and that means that Rachel is confident that her American readers will recognise and understand the word 'wanker'.

Now, 'wanker' is a pure, home-grown British slang the American equivalent of which is 'jerk-off'. But, let's face it, 'wanker' is pithier, punchier and altogether more abusive. Calling somebody a 'jerk-off' is merely naughty, but calling them a 'wanker' is downright rude and is, therefore, an infintely preferable term when your intention is to be downright rude. Rachel Lucas clearly intends to be downright rude to her left-wing compatriots.

I believe this is a recent development and I would hazard that the British end of the blogosphere has played a part in this successful export drive. In any event, we Brits have bestowed upon our US cousins a valuable tool in the armoury of bellicose confrontation, and at a time when they need it most. We have responded to their market need as they have often responded to ours.

Whilst it won't appear on any balance sheets, the term 'wanker' has now taken its place on Unofficial Honour Role of transatlantic trade history. Hurrah!

Islamic preacher Abu Obeida, an Algerian asylum seeker in Britain, has allegedly said that Islamic law requires Muslims everywhere to come to the assistance of Ba'athist Socialist Iraq if it is attacked by the West.

British journalist A.N. Wilson decries British and American threats against the Iraqi regime in his article called War on Iraq is madness, claiming that Anglo-American actions make Abu Obeida's call to British Muslims to take up arms against British forces seem quite reasonable.

But it is the achievement of Tony Blair's government that he has managed to make Mr Obeida and his friends sound like the voice of common sense.

Of course one should not think for a moment that A.N. Wilson has qualms about governments using violence, particularly against their own nationals, as he favours the forcibly sterilisation of social undesirables. Thus given his taste for violence backed state enforced eugenics I suppose his de facto support for Ba'athist National Socialism is not so hard to understand, i.e. he favours the type of regime which could actually implement the sort of views he holds.

Saddam may be a brute to his own people, but surely, by the standards of international law, this is less threatening than the Israeli occupation of territory that is simply not theirs. Think of Mrs Thatcher's reaction when General Galtieri "did an Ariel Sharon" on some barren little rocks in the south Atlantic.

So Saddam Hussain, who used poison gas to exterminate entire towns which opposed him, who invaded Kuwait and before that Iran, is less of a threat that Israel? And Wilson's history seems to have airbrushed out the fact Israel is in occupation of the West Bank and Gaza because its neighbours repeatedly attacked Israel first. I was not aware of any recent British attacks on Argentina prior to General Galtieri's military occupying the Falklands but perhaps A.N. Wilson is privy to some secret history which I am not aware of.

If I were young enough for military service and was compelled to fight either for Iraq or America, I would fight for Iraq, on the simple grounds that the Iraqis and their surrounding countries should be allowed to work out their own destinies without Western bullying. If I feel that, how much more strongly would it affect a young British Muslim?

And there we have it. Presumably if A.N.Wilson were old enough to have been available for military service in 1939 and was compelled to fight either for Nazi Germany or Britain, he would have fought for Nazi Germany, on the simple grounds that Germany and its surrounding countries, such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, the Netherland, Beligium, France and Austria, should have been allowed to work out their own destinies without British, and later American, 'bullying'.

No doubt... after all, his views of forcibly castrating and spaying the underclass would have been very well received in Berlin in those days.

Monday, December 02, 2002

Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.
- Frédéric Bastiat

Because of the vagaries of the internet, comments are occasionally attached to Samizdata pieces that were posted many weeks ago. Such comments are liable not to be noticed. Well, my email this morning contained the text of a most helpful and interesting comment from Lisa Wylde on my piece about dog expert Jan Fennell. Here's what Lisa said:

I was fortunate to get a place on one of Jan Fennell's two day foundation courses. This was spent in her home, and to see how content and relaxed her own dogs were was an absolute inspiration. I have been interested in canine behaviour for many years, and it is interesting to see that many of the "experts" do not own dogs themselves - or indeed some of them own ones with "problems". Of course there are some behaviourists, such as the late John Fisher who have a lot to teach us, unfortunately not all of them are as dedicated to the canine mind and spirit as he was.

You state that you should "ignore them all the time" this is not actually the case, simply that when YOU want to play and fuss your dog - YOU call them. Assuming they respond to your call, you can play, cuddle, fuss, whatever you want to do. But if you are sitting on the settee watching the tv, for example, and the dog comes to you uninvited, and plonks his head (or body!!) on your lap – you would quietly push them away, because you had not instigated contact. This is why some people believe it is cruel, "ignoring your dog all the time" but this is not actually what you do – just simply when you are relaxed and want to play with the dog you do so, and you would both enjoy it more, but if the dog was demanding to play, barking, jumping up etc. although you may accept his behaviour in the park when you are appropriately dressed, you may not appreciate the same "request" by your dog when you are dressed up ready to go out! Consistency is the key, if the dog knows that you will only play with it when you want to, and therefore learns manners, both of you will really relish that quality time together!

Lisa, thank you very much for this. This was the aspect of Fennellism that had been most bothering me, and you have answered my bother perfectly. After all, if you are supposed to ignore your dog all the time, then quite aside from the cruelty to your dog aspect, what, for you, is the point of having a dog? I knew there was an answer that I hadn't assimilated, and I sort of knew what it was, in fact I must have read this answer myself in Jan Fennell's book. But, I hadn't absorbed it properly. Thanks for your explanation, and for your general confirmation of what I have believed of Jan Fennell ever since my sister and brother-in-law first told me about her, which is that she is definitely on the right track – the right dog track, you might say.

Alpha dog Brian with two pack members

Well, this Samizdatista finally donned his false beard and shades to spy on the latest James Bond epic, Die Another Day at the weekend. After stumbling out of the cinema, my ears still ringing after nearly two hours of loud bangs and eye-scortching special effects, here are my random thoughts about it.

My first thought about the film is that the franchise has become so entrenched as a formula that they resemble cartoons more than films with real people. I like Pierce Brosnan, who plays Bond with a certain wry wit and swagger (though he ain't a patch on Sean Connery), but overall the film just doesn't have that certain X-factor, that sense of style and sophistication, which made the early films so much fun. I miss the John Barry scores, which created a haunting background tone of their own. There is virtually no connection any more between the Bond of the cinema and the complex character that Ian Fleming created all those years ago in the Cold War.

I quite liked the opening sequence, even the bit where our Jim gets roughed up in the North Korean prison (glad to see one of the Axis of Evil nations getting ragged in the movies. George W. Bush will love it). You don't get much of this in most Bond films, where the hero seems to pass through all manner of combats with nary a hair out of place. For once 007 gets a hard time. I sensed some members of the audience got a bit uncomfortable about that. But I thought it gave the film a bit of an edge we haven't seen before, and the film-makers deserve some credit for that.

But the basic plot idea, of an errant North Korean bad boy plotting world domination via a scheme to harness diamond tech. to vaporise the West, was, well, so damn implausible that it lost me. In fact, quite a lot of the film was pretty much like outright science fiction. Now don't get me wrong - I like science fiction. But the key to the best Bond films was ability to keep just this side of plausibility. The trouble with this one is that it falls right off the edge. Admittedly the makers may believe they have to create a diabolical villain while skating over the hottest current world controversies so as not to offend unduly. I cannot quite imagine 007 being pitched against Al Qaeda just yet. We tend to forget Bond started out going after the Russkies, but right from the start the film-makers have downplayed any ideological issues. Sometimes this means they come up with some very contrived villains. In this film none of the baddies really make a lot of sense.

The special effects and action scenes are great, but many of them are done at such high speed that you almost have no time to appreciate them. The film is not well paced. Arguably the best Bond film ever, Goldfinger, was able to mix up the rough-house stuff with slow-moving scenes such as the famous golf game with Goldfinger.

James Bond movies will probably roll on for a while yet. They make fantastic amounts of money and the makers know that barring disaster, they won't lose their drawing power yet. But wouldn't it be nice if just for once, we could tone down the gadgetry and try to make something that resembles the vision of its literary creator? I am not holding my breath.

 
Two good reasons to go see the new Bond movie

Alice Bachini takes on the post-war modern(ist) architecture and a BBC Open University educational programme in one sweeping and scathing masterblog:

"But alas, somehow, the Great Vision of Modernism went wrong. Mr Doodah is now the only person living in the enormous freezing-cold 'penthouses' perched atop the huge 'mega-centre' designed for shops and offices that inexplicably refused to co-operate with his vision and move to DumDoodle in the darkest Hebridean Countryside. "It was designed as a Centre For Living," he explained, "a complete, all-in-one place which you would never have to leave again! And look," he says. "What do we have now instead of my miraculous ideas? Shopping malls. Who wants shopping malls, might I ask you? Honestly!" and he shook his head in disbelief and delusion."

[...]

"And there we have it: modernism. Yet another tragic victim of the international capitalist conspiracy.

The End. A BBC Educational Production for the Open University."

Elon Musk, a South African internet entrepreneur made $300M on Zip2 and followed it up with $1.5B on PayPal.

His third company, set up in June this year, is SpaceX. He has done a clean sheet design start on a new vehicle aimed at cutting costs by two thirds. Falcon is targeted for launch by the end of 2003. Once operational, the two stage lox/kerosene Falcon will become the upper stages of a three stage heavy lifter.

He's out to eat Boeing, Arianespace and Lockheed's lunch.

In addition to being miserable, it seems that the British (or a few of them anyways) are also getting a bit uppity:

"Police have issued a nationwide alert after discovering a deadly explosive device attached to a speed camera."

No-one has yet claimed responsibility but I think it is safe to pretty much rule out the Islamofascists.

Sunday, December 01, 2002

They will come to learn in the end, at their own expense, that it is better to endure competition for rich customers than to be invested with monopoly over impoverished customers.
- Frédéric Bastiat

I have been wondering recently why all the Al-Qaeda attacks happen in countries that would be at the bottom of the list of expected targets for a terrorist group with their agenda. They aim at American or Israeli targets but that does not explain the exotic selection of places they chose to do so. Here is a list of suspected Al-Qaeda attacks, by no means exhaustive:

1. Djerba, Tunisia, 9th March - A truck explodes near the El Ghriba synangogue, killing 14
   
2. Rishon Letzion, Israel, 11th April - a suicide bomber kills 16 and wounds 60 at a billiard hall
   
3. Karachi, Pakistan, 14th June - suspected suicide bomber kills 14 outside Sheraton hotel and a car bomb outside the US consulate explodes later killing 11 and injuring 45
   
4. Aden, Yemen, 6th October - an explosion of the French tanker Limburg kills a crew member
   
5. Bali, Indonesia, 12th October - bombs explode outside the Sari Club disco at Kuta Beach resort killing 185 people and injuring hundreds more. A third bomb explodes near the US consulate in Sanur, no-one is hurt.
   
6. Zamboanga, Philippines, 17th October 2002 - two bombs detonated at a shopping center leaving 6 people dead and 144 injured.
   
7. Mombasa, Kenya - 28th November - a vehicle crashes into the lobby of the Paradise Hotel and together with a second device explodes, 14 killed and 80 injured. Two Stinger missiles are fired at an Israeli passenger jet at it takes off from Mombasa airport, narrowly missing 260 passengers.

These are not obvious terrorist destinations. One explanation is that the developed Western country have higher security, which makes it more difficult to carry out same style of attacks. I very much doubt that, as the IRA used to manage just fine disrupting life in London and I am not aware of any security measures that would make terrorist attacks impossible.

Any more theories about why the strange collection of targets? It is the ones that are missing from the list that puzzle me...

Paul Marks points out that it is the spending rather than the taxing which is the root of governments woe

People (not just us evil libertarians) often complain about taxation and there have been many attempts to reduce or at least limit it - these attempts have mostly been unsuccessful.

Few governments tax in order to create piles of money in their store houses - governments normally tax to spend. If we are to limit (let alone reduce) taxation it is government spending that we must fight. Limit one tax and the government will increase another - limit them all and government will borrow, ban borrowing and the fight come back to spending - i.e. (in the end) the fight is about government spending.

As far as I know there is only one State in the U.S. which shows (in its' laws) a clear understanding of this and that State is Colorado. Colorado has many problems and I would not claim it is the most free market State (although it is one of the smaller government States), but I think that its spending based version of a "Taxpayers Bill of Rights" has, over the few years of its' history, proved to be useful thing.

In Colorado government spending can only be increased in line with an increase in population or an increase in prices (yes I know there are all sorts of problems with the idea of a price index - but I will not go into that here). This would seem to a be a very moderate limitation - but (as far as I know) there is not another State in the Union that has such a limitations. Over the last few years Colorado has reduced the burden of taxation (i.e total taxes as a percentage of income - not reduced one tax and increased another) and balanced the budget.

The key really is government spending. To convince people that if they want some special benefit from government another benefit will have to be abolished (not just the total spending of the government increased).

In the end the fight has to be about spending. Whatever waffle either side comes out with about the "institutions of a just society" what matters is where the money goes. If we allow people to convince others that government spending is a "good thing" then all the anti tax and anti borrowing campaigns in the world will not save us.

Paul Marks

Instapundit reports that the Cato Institute is having a go at gun control in their nation's capital city. Makes sense. The media people don't have to go far for the story, unless they're scared of course, what with the law not having yet been changed the way it should be.

Reynolds links to Fox News, who make it clear that Cato is really rolling up its sleeves and getting stuck in to the issue.

The CATO Institute, a public policy research group that bases its work on libertarian principles, is crafting a legal challenge to Washington, D.C.'s law, claiming that all Americans have the right to defend themselves.

"The Second Amendment provides an individual right for a person to bare arms, not a collective right, not a right of the states, not a right of the militia, but a right on each and every person," said Bob Levy, a senior fellow in constitutional studies at CATO.

I don't think that's quite what Bob Levy said. Seriously, I never thought I'd see this particular spelling mistake done for real.

One of the extra shake-it-out-and-chuck-it-out items with the latest Radio Times, which I nearly did chuck out but then decided to take a look at, is one of those catalogues full of slightly stupid software for £49 "reduced to £39 SAVE £10". But one of these software packages looked really good. It was a virtual train set. "Build your own landscaped railway", said the brochure. I went to the edream.co.uk website to investigate further, and it said, of this build-your-own landscape railway (if that doesn't get you straight there, click on "Hornby Special Edition 2002" on the right of the main page):

Adults and children alike adore model railways but how many can afford the money and space for their own set? Well, you can! This new 2002 virtual train set costs less than £20 and lives in your PC so there's no clutter and no tidying up. Operate legendary engines ancient and modern from The Flying Scotsman to Eurostar around sprawling track layouts to whistle blasts and the clackety-clack of rolling stock as you switch points and pull up at platforms and sidings.

MORE...

Sundon Lower School in Bedfordshire has banned video and digital cameras from its nativity play this year, because it is worried that the images may get into the hands of paedophiles.

So let me get this right... The head teacher of a state school has banned parents from recording their children in a play. How can it be okay for a woman in authority to be instilling fear of sexual predators into small children, clearly implying their own parents are collectively under suspicion?

This is the toxic paranoid psychology of the witch hunt. The world is not packed full of paedophiles hunting for pictures of nativity plays but it suits some people to act as it that was the case... powers must be expanded to 'protect' children after all and who better than a pettifogging head teacher to do that?

I suspect that this head teacher must be a fifth columnist for the Home Schooling Movement in Britain because no one is really that idiotic and paranoid, right? Right?

Saturday, November 30, 2002

The Libertarian case against the Federal Election Commission (FEC) is going to the courts now and there is every expectation it will go all the way to the Supreme Court. Read Perry Willis' testimony if you want to know more of the details.

I hope Real Campaign Reform succeeds in their civil liberties battle for us, but if they should fail... our North American readers could organize some very creative Guerilla Campaigning. You may want to begin planning of your 2004 campaign law snoot cocking right now.

Your mission, should you chose to accept it Mr. Phelps, is to keep alive the idea of a free and open political process. Here are a few ideas:

1. Start your own underground Free Libertarian Voters "cell" (the FLV as opposed to the dastardly LFV) with a few trustworthy friends. No one outside your group should even know you have "formed". Above all, do not discuss this with anyone who is involved with an above ground "official" campaign group. Look in a mirror and practice not telling yourself about it.

2. Using your own computers and printers, make up flyers and posters for Libertarian candidates. Do nothing traceable: Big Brother is watching. Go out in the dead of night and plaster them all over. Place stacks in information trays; hand some out to passersby at malls or other busy areas. And don't forget! Black ski masks are a serious fashion faux pas this season!

3. Come up with harmless and non damaging publicity pranks that will garner positive attention to your candidate or perhaps negative attention to the records of the Demopublican candidates. Do this especially in the last few days before the campaign.

4. Try to do as much rhetorical damage to the FEC and its' regulations as you possibly can. Make them look like fools: "Every joke is a tiny revolution". Make them look like a bunch of anti-democracy demogogues. That they actually are should help you immensely in this task.

5. Brainstorm with your cell. Be creative like the "Sons Of Liberty". They invented guerilla theatre over a few pints in the Green Dragon, an idea so advanced we didn't invent the name until 190 years later.

   Read "Rules for Radicals" by Saul Alinsky. It worked for the Left, it will work for you! This book is also very funny. I'd never have thought of a political use for baked beans.

6. Don't get caught. You really could be in it extremely deep. You could go to jail for supporting the candidate of your choice in a non-State approved fashion, time and place.

7. If you are caught, read about the Chicago 7 for some really cool ideas on how to make a mockery of the campaign laws in the courtroom. Judge Hoffman is probably long retired by now, but there are other buffoons in robes and you might get lucky. If you're going to spend a few years behind bars, you might as well land a good blow for Liberty on the way to the slammer.

   Read defendant Abbie Hoffman's "Steal This Book" or "Revolution for the Hell of It" to get into the proper frame of mind. Again. It worked for the Left, it'll work for you!

8. "Black world" campaigning must always be totally deniable by real campaign organizations. You can't work in both. You can't even communicate across the boundary. They cannot know who you are or what you are doing, not even a clue. For real. I'm not joking.

9. Watch what the official campaign is doing and follow their lead. Campaign managers know more about what is going on than you do. Don't go off on your own tangent. Remember the Hippocratic Oath: "The first rule is to do no harm".

It will be good practice just in case more of our civil liberties have to be exercised underground. I guess one could say "If political campaigning is outlawed, only outlaws will have political campaigns."

We aren't called Samizdata for nothing you know!

This tape will self destruct in zzzzzztttttttttttttttt...........

From being the envy of the world, the British armed forces are in danger of becoming merely average: a cut-price, camouflaged UNICEF...

My sources tell me that this is an accurate account of what's going on in the British Army at the moment. Or more precisely, how the New Labour government has been undermining one of the most respected and professional British institutions:

The British military and New Labour are politically and philosophically polar opposites. The government has made these differences even more acute by spending much of the last few years forcing soldiers to adopt a work ethic more in line with commerce than with combat. Who Dares Wins has been replaced by Health and Safety. The government believes that it has a duty to look after soldiers by protecting their 'rights', but this approach to soldiering seriously undermines the ability of the men and women of the armed forces to get on with a difficult and dangerous job.

[...]

The government’s obsession with political correctness has been applied to the military with such relish that at times it seems almost insane. I have lost count of the number of forms I have had to fill in giving details of my ethnic origin. These forms used to be anonymous, but the last one I had to complete carried my name, rank and service number. Perhaps this was a reaction to an earlier (anonymous) form, which had revealed that in our all-male unit there was a huge number of Bangladeshi single mothers!

[...]

Health-and-safety inspectors are blamed for recommending that chlorine be introduced into the underwater tunnel, in case some poor Commando picks up a bit of dysentery or a sore throat as a result of wading through dirty water. The steep ravines worn into the slopes that recruits had to run up and down at various points on the seven-mile course were also contrary to all sorts of well-meaning legislation. The recommendation was for proper steps and handrails to be installed — just like the ones you find in the mountains of Afghanistan or the wadis of Iraq.

The armed forces in the UK are currently so over-streched that their management amounts to a permanent crisis-management. The professionalism and high quality of the British army currently rests on the dedication of its officers. Let's face it, they are not there for the money and they don't get to shoot much these days either. The British military doesn't lobby, speak out, point out the ignorance of the current government of military matters (which has no limits as this is the first government where nobody has a direct military experience) or do anything that would undermine its strong ethos as a 'civilian' army. Her Majesty the Queen, a civilian, is head of the Navy, Army and Air Force of Britain.

Perhaps they should.

I briefly toyed with the idea of posting this under the 'Humour' category but, the trouble is, I am not making this up. I couldn't possibly make this up.

In a country where virtually all forms of private firearm ownership have been outlawed, there was a march today in South-East London by a group calling itself 'Mothers Against Guns' in protest at rising gun violence.

But that thigh-slapping irony descends into tragi-farce:

"The march had to be re-routed away from the crime scene of the early morning shooting outside Pharaoh's Pub in Peckham Road.

Police confirmed one man was killed on the spot and that another was in a stable condition in hospital after the incident.

Sometimes I feel as if this isn't a nation anymore. More like an open-air Theatre of the Absurd.

I don't normally respond publicly to comments, but I will make an exception. Peter Cutbertson has a blog called Conservative Commentary, it is certainly better than the Conservative Party's website. He thinks that this conclusion I made makes me insane:

"The problem for British libertarians is that they aren't really used to the idea that the state really is our enemy. This is one reason why I don't think that the UK withdrawing from the European Union is an automatic recipe for joy."

In the exchange which follows he appears to believe that "without law or government" society cannot function, and those who disagree with him are "insane" or follow "an incoherent, warped political philosophy".

I am very tempted to ask our Mr Cuthbertson to define Conservative political philosophy, in plain coherent terms, with the agreement of those current and former leaders of the Conservative Party who are still alive: Heath, Thatcher, Major, Hague and Duncan Smith. But I don't hate the man, so I won't.

However, it amazes me that Mr Cuthbertson cannot see that law doesn't necessarily derive from government. For a start, any conservative who believes in God ought to consider the possibility that there is a higher authority than the State. Assuming atheism (which isn't very conservative, but hey, who's being coherent?), I should have hoped that a conservative might believe in the organic, spontaneous order of common law. Assuming God doesn't exist, and the common law is a fiction (sounds more like a French Jacobin!), what has Mr Cuthbertson done with civil society? Is it true that members of the Carlton Club only behave because of the fear of being arrested by the police? Does the members' code of conduct depend on the State for its existence and enforcement? Is there an Act of Parliament for table manners?

If the cream of the Conservative movement believe that regulation of human behaviour is only possible by State intervention, then it is no wonder the Conservative Parliamentary Party is an unelectable shambles comprised largely of cretins, petty crooks, pompous buffoons and in-bred yahoos. I will take no lessons in morality or "coherent political philosophy" from a Tory.

Shop 'til you drop day!

Some who think poverty is a noble, exalted state would have you buy nothing today, calling it 'Buy nothing day'. But those who reject the Luddite anti-life call of atavistic collectivism know better.

Every November 30^th, we all need to remind ourselves that due to the creeping spread of global capitalism, more of humanity has been lifted above a subsistence level of existence than at any other time in the history of our species.

Plumbers, builders, postmen, farm workers, sailors... all owning technological marvels like motorcars, televisions, computers, all having unheard of life expectancies. This occurs not because of central planning, but rather in spite of it... yet somehow Paris gets fed.

So on November 30^th go out and turn your mundane daily participation in the capitalist system into a celebration of it! Make it special. Go out and buy the one you love a book they have wanted but is only available in hardback or maybe even a nice sheepskin coat for the winter. You know it makes sense.

Friday, November 29, 2002

From pixalated passions to physical phrolics, the cabalistic Sasha Castel and the vampiric Andrew Dodge - a union made in heaven, hmmm, ... or perhaps the other place [A little known village in Dorset].

The blogosphere is agog.

My previous posting about 'ironic Jihad' was satirical but this is certainly not!

The militant Islamic group Hamas is urging followers to conduct a three-day 'electronic Jihad' on Jewish websites, starting today, Novermber 29th. Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles said the latest find this week was particularly alarming:

"We have had numerous hackings back and forth between Israeli and Islamic sites since the Intifada began two years ago.

But this is something we have not seen in some time. There seems to be an entire portion of a We site which is devoted to a 'how to' get involved in that kind of activity."

The term 'Jewish' websites could mean anything from Israeli government sites to any company that does business with Israel.

Apparently, the same way bloggers are using the Internet as a forum for ideas and for additional sources of information, increasingly computer literate Islamic groups are using it to transform the Islamic and Islamist world and to circumvent official sources of information.

"....The Internet has become not only a battlefield, as this announcement would seem to indicate... of electronic wars, but it is also a key element in propaganda battles in Arabic, Persian and in English."

It is good to know that in a turbulent world, one can count on our Anglosphere cousins down under to maintain their glorious traditions of brash vulgarity and plain-spokenness (and not to mention the ability to kick ass at cricket). On a gloomy November afternoon, while pondering the latest tragic events in Kenya, I came across this cheeky little news report, which should gladden the hearts of anyone who has less than 100 percent respect for the police, who increasingly seem more intent on social control than beating crime.

Lawyers for an Australian man who "mooned" a police car claimed it was his constitutional right and part of the larrikin Australian character.

Sounds entirely reasonable to me!

UK Transport is now Transport Blog, and has a burst of short but varied new postings. This is a good name, combining Patrick Crozier's all-embracingly global field of vision (although the latest postings are mostly British, with only the occasional Japanese reference) with his general gloom about his ability to dazzle. No "Transports of Delight" nonsense.

Now that Patrick has moved it over to Movable Type, I am nagging him to set me up with automatic posting rights to Transport Blog, to take up some of the slack when he gets too depressed about the state of Britain's deeply depressing transport infrastructure, for words, as it were. When my campaign has succeeded, this is the kind of stuff I'll be putting there, although if Perry wants to insert a weekend type picture here, I recommend this as being more his (our) kind of thing.

Being a pedestrian with a heart condition is about to get worse.

In my previous posting here, about Gordon Brown's plans to wreck the British economy, I said that all that was one reason I was happy. Here's another: Brian's EDUCATION Blog. It's not for me to be saying how good this is, but I can say that so far I am managing to keep on doing whatever it is I'm doing. I'm not running out of things to say.

For example, I'm already thinking about a post I hope to do soon concerning the vital importance to the development of Silicon Valley not just in a general way of Stanford University, but in particular of just one academic at Stanford University, a man called Frederick Terman. I've semi-known about this man for almost as long as I've known about Silicon Valley, but there's nothing like having to write regularly for a specialist blog to make you learn the outlines of a story like this properly, by the simple procedure of writing it out. Quite aside from what others may be learning from it, think what Brian's Education Blog is doing for Brian's Education. The ambiguity of the title is entirely deliberate.

And what about the writings of others that I might otherwise have missed?

MORE...

Someone tried to shoot down an airliner full of Jews, not in Israel but in Africa...

Jew on holiday. Legitimate target
anywhere in the world, apparently.

But Jews = Israel and Israel = bad, in fact very bad as it is not just 'Jewish' but also 'White'. Therefore the people who did this must be misguided 'Islamic activists'. Terrible but 'understandable' to idiotarians and other sundry folk who take Noam Chomsky seriously. You know, the sort of people who say "Who are we do judge the value of other cultures?" and "Of course I deplore terrorism, but..."

Kikambala in Kenya is ripped apart by the same people who tried to shoot down the passenger jet and slaughtered Kenyans are photographed in the ruins of the resort which used to bring much needed foreign money into Kenya's economy...

Vanquished capitalist tools perhaps? CIA agents maybe?

Black people in the Third World lie dead, therefore people who did this must be capitalists, um, imperialists, errr, Americans, no, Mac Donalds, um, er, ah...

I see pictures like those and I am soooooo sick of the people who say "It is all about Israel!" or "It is all about oil!" or "It is all about US policy!"... those dead Kenyans are not in Israel, I rather doubt they owned shares in any oil companies and they did not get to vote for who became the President of the United States.

What "it is all about" is that there are people using violence who advocate coercive pan-Islamic collectivism and who wish to force submission on everyone else. Once this is understood, all that needs to follow is to determine the best way to exterminate them as expeditiously as possible.

The irreverent Brainstrust reports how "devastated victims on all sides of the Miss World riots have claimed that they were merely trying to make an amusing point in an ironic manner and that their opposite numbers 'have no sense of humour at all'."

Read here about a comedy fatwa and call for a full-scale ironic jihad... It's Friday, for God's sake!

Despite all the evidence to the contrary, far too many people still believe that their elected officials exist to look after the interests of the ordinary person. Yes, of course they make mistakes. Doesn't everybody? Still, their hearts are in the right place and that's what counts.

For those who may still harbour these lingering, absurd delusions, I recommend this article by Sean Gabb.

As always, Sean's language is both florid and forthright. But so it should be because it explains, in detail, how wealth-producing, hard-working Britons have been robbed of their future by a government that they, inexplicably, still trust above all other institutions.

"But the tax changes are enough. People of my generation may now be looking at a far less comfortable retirement than we expected. Some of us may find ourselves in very straitened circumstances. Those of us lucky enough to stay reasonably healthy may find ourselves having to delay or even give up on retirement."

And it may get worse. We have a desperate administration that has plundered everything in sight and the temptation to help themselves to the juicy, low-hanging fruit of private pension funds, may be more than they can resist.

The government is not your friend.

Thursday, November 28, 2002

David Carr is happy, because now not only is he sunk in gloom but he reckons all of us are, and especially me, Samizdata's Optimism Correspondent. Bad news David, I'm happy now.

I have a number of reasons to be happy, but I'll focus on just one. Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown has been taxing the British economy at a higher rate, but, to his surprise and consternation, the extra tax revenue that he assumed he would get by putting the rates up has not proved to be forthcoming. In the House of Commons yesterday, he had to explain. He blamed the world economy. (Don't they all?)

Well guess what. I told you so, on Tuesday May 28th. This makes me happy.

What this confirms …

(I was referring to a piece by Paul Staines)

… is that British government income is now as high as it can be. Increasing the percentage rate of taxation doesn't increase government tax income, it merely slows the economy down and causes government income to remain static. Similarly, if the government were to reduce the percentage rate of tax, government income wouldn't decrease. This would merely cause the economy to surge forward, and the smaller slice of a bigger cake would end up being the same size as the bigger slices of smaller cakes. Britain is now at the top of the Laffer Curve. Isn't that exciting? In plain English, the bastards are taking us for the absolute maximum amount they can, and if they get any greedier we stop coming through their bit of the forest.

Gordon Brown's response to his problem is that he has decided to take the government a lot deeper into debt than he originally had in mind to do, which is a further - albeit disguised – increase in the rate of taxation. If the government borrows the kind of money it now intends to borrow, it will raise the interest rates that all other borrowers have to pay.

So let me leave all my winnings from my previous bet on the table and give this prophecy game another whirl of the wheel. Brown's latest decision will slow the economy down some more, and he still won't get his hands on enough money to finance his spending spree. These plans can never materialise, and that fact will have to be recognised if Britain is not to be pushed down the far side of the Laffer Curve towards economic meltdown.

What this all shows is that, as usual, there are, in the words of Noel Coward, bad times just around the corner. What it also shows is that enjoying life is all about attitude. It's not the facts that make you happy or unhappy; what counts is how you look at them and what you make of them.

Doubtless co-ordinated with gun-attacks inside Israel, Arab/Al-Qaeda terrorists have also bombed a resort hotel in Kenya.

The death toll from the hotel bombing is now 14 people, 11 Kenyans and 3 Israelis (two children).

Even more ominously, there was a simultaneous rocket attack on an Israeli civilian airliner. Mercifully unsuccessful, but a very worrying development.

I reported on the Twente University server room fire last week. According to this item in the Debian News mail list it was arson:

"Debian Server burnt down. Wichert Akkerman reported that a fire started in the computing facilities of Twente University. According to the fire department, everything in the building and the entire building was burnt to the ground. The Debian server "satie" that served as security and non-US archive was hosted there. Two days later, the Security Team reported that the security service was successfully reinstalled on another server. The nm and qa hosts had their home on satie as well and were also reinstalled on klecker. It has finally been confirmed that the fire was a result of arson."

One has to wonder about motive. It's just not the done thing to go burning down a university computer centre.

If, like me, you avidly devour everything this man ever writes, but get a little impatient trawling the blogosphere seeking out his hitherto-elusive brilliance, then get ready to be happy.

Mark Steyn now has has his own website!

Now that's what I call progress.

[My thanks to Tim Blair for the link]

This poster can be seen all over London. In it a young man standing at a bus stop chats on his mobile phone, a sight one sees all the time on London's busy streets.

What the Metropolitan Police are saying is that doing this, talking on a mobile phone in London, in public, is unwise behaviour. Okay, fair enough, London is a big city and all big cities have their fair share of street crime, so what is the problem with this message from the boys in blue?

The problem I have is that this poster is not warning criminals who might attack us and steal our phones of the sure vengeance of the law. Not it is calling on us all to refuse to tolerate thieves in our midst and to resist to the best of our ability. Hell, how about suggesting "if you have a mobile phone in your hand and you either witness a mugging in progress or think you are in danger, dial 999 and the Police, whose paychecks and cars with flashing lights come from your taxes, will come rushing to the rescue".

No, it does not say that at all. The real message here from our appointed protectors is not "we will protect you from crime" and certainly not "protect yourself from street crime", but rather HIDE from street crime.

OUT OF SIGHT IS SAFER

The state cannot protect you, it will not permit you to protect yourself effectively, so all it can do is offer advice... and the advice is hide. Do not show anyone you have something worth stealing. I expect we will soon see posters across London saying "it is safer not to wear Armani suits, you might get mugged" and then "don't wear short skirts, you might get raped" and finally "don't go out at all, the streets are not safe".

Perhaps when the state has taxed everything and we no longer have anything left to hide, we will indeed have 'safer streets'.

The state is not your friend.

Wednesday, November 27, 2002

The main differences between a British libertarian gathering and an American one is the attitude towards foreign affairs and their own governments. During the Cold War many American libertarians, Murray Rothbard especially, denounced the US federal government's attempts to "encircle" Communism, build alliances, station troops in Europe etc.

Most British libertarians, being somewhat closer to the Iron Curtain, and feeling that the English Channel might not be a huge obstacle to the Asiatic hordes of the Red Army, were rather happier with the presence of large, well equipped armies. We also took a more relaxed view of state violations of individual rights when the persons concerned were Communists, pro-Soviet peace protesters or "useful idiots" who acted spontaneously in a manner which would have delighted Stalin, Hitler or Napoleon.

We tended to admire the antics of the security services as they "bugged and burgled their way across London". Some of us cheered when police officers on horseback smashed their way through ranks of protesting miners in 1984. I know no one in British libertarian circles who wondered if it might not be our turn some day, although Sean Gabb came closest.

The gloom among British libertarians today is partly the result of the realisation that now the apparatus of state oppression is randomly destroying people's lives like in the final chapters of "Atlas Shrugged".

But there is something particularly awful about the gloom engulfing British libertarians. No one born in the mainland of the United Kingdom and alive today has ever seen a group of police officers march up a residential street, knocking at selected doors and leading families away to some awful fate. Yet in every other member state of the European Union except Finland and Sweden, the are people who remember watching their neighbours being taken away. In the case of recent refugees from the former Yugoslavia, such memories may be very recent indeed.

The problem for British libertarians is that they aren't really used to the idea that the state really is our enemy. This is one reason why I don't think that the UK withdrawing from the European Union is an automatic recipe for joy.

The Canadian government official who branded U.S. President George W. Bush a "moron" has resigned, news services report.

Consider the recent actions and achievements of this 'moron':

• Propose a massive cutback in world tariffs.
  
• Republicans win back control of the Senate and boost control in House of Representatives.
  
• The tax cut.
  
• Force UN to get serious about Iraq.
  
• Stiff the Kyoto Treaty.
  
• Ditto the International Criminal Court.
  
• Kick out the Taliban from Afghanistan.
  
• Foster vastly improved relations with Russia.
  
• Make serious social security reform a key GOP agenda item.
  
• Fracture the Democrat hold on the ethnic vote.

  And finally,

• Seriously annoy the EU junta.

Okay, okay, I hear you libertarians cry, what about the Patriot Act, the Farm Bill, the steel tariffs? All fair criticisms. But the oft-repeated claim from the chattering classes that Bush is a dope is plainly silly. They are making the same mistake they made about Ronald Reagan.

Paul Marks reminds us that the motivation to do good does not ensure good is actually done

Today I read the obituary of John Rawls (who died on Sunday) in the Daily Telegraph. Dr Rawls was a brave soldier, a loving husband and a good father to four children - he was also kind and polite to all who encountered him.

However, Dr Rawls was also the author of "A Theory of Justice" (1971) the main modern justification for the ever increasing burden of the welfare state.

According to Dr Rawls no one had any right to increase their income or wealth unless they could prove that by so doing they improved the economic life of the "least favoured". Just not harming the least favoured would not do - as inequality harmed the "self esteem" of the poor.

Interestingly I also read in today's Daily Telegraph a little example of how Rawlsian type thinking works out in practice. In the Spanish region of Valencia the government is working in a public-private partnership to improve the lot of the least favoured. Private developers produce a plan for the creation of urban zones (flats, shops, places of business and so on) in sparsely populated coastal areas, the government judges the plan and then levies a tax on land owners in the area to provide such things as roads and drainage.

What a wonderful thing - from either a Rawlsian or a utilitarian point of view.

However, the plan means that retired people who have bought properties by the coast have to pay the government lots of money (or have their property taken away) for roads and drainage (and so on) that do not benefit them.

Why do I think that Rawls (kind and decent man that he was) would have been disgusted by this sort of thing?

before you say "but that is the corruption of the idea" - maybe so, but that is statism in practice.

Paul Marks

In one of the most utterly wrong headed articles I have ever seen in the Daily Telegraph, called Watch out America, the 7st EU weakling may kick sand in your face by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard posting from Brussels (naturally), he would have us believe that, in response to criticisms from the USA that the EU is "a status quo power that resists and resents being hurried into a turbulent new post-Cold War era":

...Europe is arguably the world's most dynamic political bloc today. While the US borders have changed little since 1848, the EU is about to swallow eastern Europe up to the edge of Russia and Ukraine.

The EU is about to swallow the poison pill of the basket case post-communist agricultural economies of Eastern Europe, eager to feed at the massively subsidized trough of protectionist Europe and Evans-Pritchard holds this up as evidence of dynamism?

But EU officials are quietly confident that the strategic balance will shift as a decade of debt, over-consumption, and ballooning trade deficits catch up with America.

[...]

"Nobody wants to see America in difficulty, but there's a high risk that the Clinton boom is going to end badly. Then we'll find out if Europe's slow vessel might not prove to be steadier in the long run." One day soon, America may wake to find itself facing a wealthy superpower of 470 million people.

The European Union... filled with heavily taxed, highly regulated and subsidy 'protected' economies... is going to overtake lower taxed, less regulated and slightly less subsidised USA? Oh give me a break. The whole reason that the ruling classes of Eastern Europe want to join the European Union, is that the EU seeks to lock in the position of the all its political classes, to insulate them from the reality of de-politicised markets and the consequences of that anti-market politics brings.

Eastern European businesses, at least some of them, see subsidy and protection from global competition from the USA and Far East beckoning, voters likewise see membership of the EU as meaning the end of restrictions on their ability to travel, work and reside in the more developed West... a 'brain drain' heading west of the best and brightest that the middle European former 'eastern Bloc' has to offer will soon ensue (good news if you live in the 'west'), followed closely by an army of welfare parasites looking to help themselves to taxpayer money in Britain, France, Germany, Denmark, The Low Countries and Italy (extremely bad news of you live in the 'west').

The very essence of the EU is stasis and yet paradoxically, it is spreading, like some Nordic legend of winter eternal sends its deadening cold fingers into everything. The only people who really benefit are those who are sucking at the teat of the state and even them only until the curves of the EU's spectacularly aging demographics and that of its increasing tax burden cross, like some cruxiform tombstone.

The First World used to be 'The West' and Japan, the Second World used to be the Socialist Eastern Bloc... soon 'First World' will come to mean the USA, Switzerland, Japan (maybe), Canada (maybe), Australia and new Zealand and, if it finally breaks clear of the European suicide pact, Britain and possibly even Ireland. 'Second World' will just come to mean sclerotic Europe, forever sidelined by more dynamic economies eleswhere and more assertive polities everywhere.

EU as future 'superpower'? Don't make me laugh.

The German Chancellor is clearly feeling just a wee bit insecure these days. Why else would would he actually go to Court to sue a news agency because they claimed that he used dye in his hair:

"With affidavits from his barber, Schroeder insisted that the article was false and that it had created a wave of stories that were hurting his image."

Would that be his image as an incompetent, plundering, unreconstructed tax-and-spend socialist who is wrecking his country's economy? Oh right, that image.

Anyway, in order to avoid any legal complications here at Samizdata, I hereby categorically refute any suggestions that the German Chancellor has ever dyed his hair. After all, why would he need to? It is a wig.

I don't suppose any of our readers can have failed to notice the patina of despondency that has, of late, descended upon this corner of the blogland.

I am the usual and evergreen suspect. Optimism has always stood in stark contrast to my natural grain and my comrades have long-since stopped denouncing me for it and learned to live with my periodic predictions of impending doom. However, I am but Pollyanna herself compared to Paul Marks, the poster-boy of the Euthanasia Movement.

There was a time when our brooding presence was felt but nonetheless heavily diluted by the ebullient, thematic jolliness of the remaining Samizdatistas. But now Perry de Havilland seems to have stumbled into a pit of despair and even the stomach-churningly cheerful Brian Micklethwait has 'fessed up to an onset of the highly contagious Carr-itis.

But why, I hear you inquire. Is this a neurological condition brought on by over-exposure to the internet? Is it because we are perenially-disappointed libertarians? No, it's because we are British:

"People are growing increasingly pessimistic, with a majority believing that Britain is "grinding to a halt", a YouGov poll for The Daily Telegraph has found.

The survey shows a country depressed by the prospect of falling pension values, failing hospitals, pot-holed roads, unspoken fears of terrorism and a possible war against Iraq.

Eighty five per cent of people worry that they can no longer rely on public services, while 53 per cent agree with foreign media reports that "nothing in Britain works".

See, for all these years I was not being contrary, I was merely ahead of the curve and now that all my compatriots are conforming to national type, I can take nought but scant consolation in feeling vindicated.

All exhortations to cheery optimism are futile. It's too late for therapy and prozac won't work. We're not depressed, we're just British. Pity us.