Friday
(0)
(6)I believe I detect some tantalising signs that the Many-Headed Hydra of the British State is, at last, beginning to eat itself:
Institutional racism is a "blot upon the good name of the NHS", a report on the death of a black patient has said.An inquiry said the failure to give ethnic minority people proper mental health care was a "festering abscess".
It follows the death of schizophrenic patient David Bennett in 1998, after he was restrained at a clinic in Norwich.
Retired High Court judge Sir John Blofeld, who lead the inquiry team, said the death of Mr Bennett - known to friends as Rocky - was "tragic and totally unnecessary".
His team said it believed institutional racism was present throughout NHS mental health services.
This 'institutional racism' thingy has turned out to be a very useful multi-purpose weapon. Perhaps they should drop one into Iraq to help quell the insurgents.
In any event, considering the disproportionately high number of people from ethnic minority backgrounds who work in the NHS, I find this accusation very hard to believe. In fact, I will go as far as saying that it is bunkum. Bunkum on stilts. Bunkum with knobs on. About as plausible as an EU anti-corruption drive.
It made more than 20 recommendations including the demand that NHS staff working with the mentally ill are trained in "cultural awareness and sensitivity".
We have to respect the fact that some people choose to be stark, raving bonkers and that that choice is just as valid as people who happen to be in full control of their mental faculties. All states of mind are the same and doing things like eating spiders and lurking around public parks flashing the old one-eyed trouser snake at little old ladies are merely alternative lifestyle choices that we should celebrate. In fact, these people are not barmy at all, they are just....differently conscious.
But, truly, this is a puzzlement. The NHS is the 'Jewel in the Crown' of the public sector and the only thing still holding that wheezing, cankered Leviathan together is the commitment and morale of the staff working within. What better way to dissolve all that goodwill than by subjecting them to the kind of Inquisitional ordeal that 'cultural awareness training' entails?
Do these accusers not appreciate or realise that the possible consequences of their campaign might be to cattle-prod this most sacred of sacred cows straight into the merciless metal teeth the abbatoir? Or perhaps they do realise but they simply do not care? Perhaps the years of unimpaired success have so sharpened the appetites of these professional race warriors that they have become like ravenous wolves, turning on their class confreres and ripping out great gobs of flesh in a feeding frenzy?
Well, either way, I say it is best to let nature take its course.
Thursday
Well, lovers out there, St. Valentine's Day is rapidly approaching. For those in the mood I heartily recommend the new CD by that wonderful young diva, Nora Jones, who's debut album has already sold a reported 17 million copies worldwide.
Ms Jones's success and background got me thinking on an important cultural point. We are led to believe, for example, that globalisation will lead to the extinction of local, unique cultures and the replacement of a sort of mushy global soup. And yet as the writer Tyler Cowen showed in a recent excellent book on the cultural riches possible via globalisation, the growing mix of different cultures possible on today's world is making possible new directions in areas like music and art. Nora Jones, with her mixed ethnic background and her fusion of country and western, blues and soul music styles, is a living embodiment of what Cowen means.
And she is certainly rather easy on the eye, in case you wondered.
Do you remember Liberia? There was a big fuss about it awhile back. Yeah, that one, the place in West Africa. The one with the bridge surface scattered with enough brass to build a Napoleonic cannon. The one with the guys who couldn't hit a barn door at point blank range with a full AK47 clip.
It seems the post-Taylor era is working out as well as could have been expected. The violence has subsided, bands of marauding 'rebels' are disarming, loads of aid is flowing in and the new government is in place. Unknown to most of us, due to lack of media interest, US President Bush found time to keep on top of the affair and meet with Liberians.
Colin Powell says the former 'President' of Liberia will eventually pay for his crimes.
You can catch up on it here. You have not been hearing much because without doom and gloom, where is the story?
If you believed the media you would think there were no place in the world without a dead body or two casually laying about.
It seems to me that the latest suicide bombings in Iraq, targeted at Iraqis nascent army, should be met with a blizzard of public relations aimed not at minimizing the horror of what happen but rather making it clear that the perpetrators are trying to play the Iraqi people for fools.
Certainly seeking to play one section of Iraqi society off against another is potential a highly effective strategy for the bag guys. However by making the revelations such as the one Dale wrote about yesterday as widely known as possible within Iraq, this could be turned around in a most interesting fashion and perhaps used to promote a sense of solidarity within Iraq againt the Al-Qaeda/Ba'athist hardcore.
Perhaps the propaganda war will be the decisive battle in this struggle and paradoxically publicizing the enemy's views as widely as possible might be the Allies trump card. By their own words they are revealed. Now let them be reviled for them.
(The Times, March 28, 2003)
An Australian swam 300 yards with a live shark clamped to his leg before driving a mile for assistance to have it removed (the shark, not the leg)!
They make 'em tough down-under!
G'day, Sport!
There is an interesting article by Peaches Geldof about the perils of being a little bit too free and easy with one's innermost thoughts on-line.
Mandatory reading for all Journal Bloggers!
Two decades ago I used to love arguing about the rights and wrongs of capitalism, socialism, social democracy, collectivism, communism, etc. Now, I don't have the adrenalin for it. Now I prefer to offer observations, big or small, and let others fight about them while I cook up my next observations. Thank God (by which I of course mean Perry de Havilland and his editorial confreres – thank goodness might be a better way of putting it) for Samizdata.net, because here I can do just that.
But if you want a good old libertarians-versus-collectivists row to join in on, this Chris Bertram post together with all the comments it has provoked could be just your ticket.
Chris Bertram says this about the Morecambe tragedy in which nineteen Chinese cockle pickers perished:
But one thing that needs saying is that such tragedies are a normal and predictable consequence of capitalism and not simply the result of coercion and abuse by a few criminals.
Bertram's piece is a classic example of what one might term Implied Collectivism. Capitalism, says Bertram, regularly causes violent deaths. The clear implication is that therefore "capitalism" needs in some way to be severely hobbled, if not done away with altogether, and that if that happened, poverty would likewise be diminished or even done away with too. But he doesn't dare come out flat with the claim that capitalism ought to be cut back, still less got rid of, on poverty relief grounds, because that would be too daft. He doesn't even think this, because he does have more than a trace of intellectual efficacy and moral sanity in that befuddled head of his. Nevertheless he allows the implication to float in the air, because he wants it to be true, or seems to. Not admirable. He ends his piece thus:
But we mustn’t forget that the root cause of many such tragedies is that poor people need to risk themselves in order that they and those they love may live. Unless they cease to be poor, and cease to face such unpalatable choices, such events will happen again and again.
There is as much truth in that bit of writing as in any where the words "root" and "cause" are to be found next to each other and in that order, but so what? Why blame "capitalism" for that? This is like blaming oxygen for forest fires.
And if poor people are to cease to be poor, what they need is more capitalism, different bits of capitalism to choose between, not less of it. If those wretched cockle pickers had had more and consequently better choices, they might not have chosen the risk of drowning for the sake of £1 a day. And … oh, but I've said all this, argued all that.
Read more.Wednesday
This, a report from the London Evening Standard, is going to make David Carr very happy:
London's rivals for the 2012 Olympics have already started exploiting a row between British and Irish officials over Northern Ireland which could seriously damage the bid, Standard Sport can reveal today.The row has become so inflamed that Ireland's International Olympic Committee member Patrick Hickey, one of the leading figures in European sport, has said the British Olympic Association, who organise this summer's team for Athens, could look like "clowns".
The Olympic Council of Ireland, who say they have traditionally had jurisdiction over the area, is angry that the BOA have suddenly decided to add the words "Northern Ireland" to their team contracts for the Athens Olympics.
But what is so clownish about that? This story explains the situation rather better:
Hickey said, "they would have to withdraw those letters in the team agreement where they have added Northern Ireland. Otherwise they will look completely foolish when we turn up in Athens with seven to 10 members of our team from Northern Ireland and nobody from Northern Ireland on the British team. They would look like clowns".
Yes, that would be clownish all right. But there is more involved than that. The Irish suspect that the British use of the words "Northern Ireland" in those team contracts could be a sign of action to come, at some time in the future. Back to the Standard:
The BOA strongly deny they have attempted to change anything and played down the dispute. The Irish see the move as a threat to the future of all-Ireland sports teams. …
Odd, those "all-Ireland" sports teams. The only game I know about in this connection is Rugby Union. (Irish people do not concern themselves with cricket very much.) And yes, next Saturday, the opening match of the Six Nations Rugby Union championship will be France v. Ireland, at the Stade de France in Paris. Ireland as in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, with two different Irish national anthems if I am not mistaken. No doubt this arrangement was arrived at during an era when sport and politics inhabited different universes, and the politicians regarded what the sportsmen did as entirely the business of the sportsmen. Also, in former times, whatever arrangements the British made with their neighbours were no-one else's business. Now, sport is big business and big politics, and Britain is just one beast in the global sporting pack. Now, the mere wording of a team contract can take on a huge international significance:
Hickey revealed today that several bidding cities, keen to take advantage of London's problems, had already contacted him since this newspaper broke the story about the dispute last week.
My guess is it was one of David's lawyer friends (all lawyers know all other lawyers – this is a well known fact) who wrote those contracts, in a deliberately provocative manner, and then rang up all the competing cities to tell them about this row. After all, if enough people say there is a row, there is!
So David's No Olympics for London campaign is getting nicely into gear, and I congratulate him on progress so far.
Genua had once controlled the river mouth and taxed its traffic in a way that couldn't be called piracy because it was done by the city government.
- Local-body politics explained (Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad)
Being an ideologue of purity in the purist mould of teetotaller George Best, I'm increasingly coming to the conclusion that the once politically invincible British Conservative Party is rapidly becoming untenable even to me, yes to me, a proud member of the intellectually lightweight jellyfish club. Witness this quote from today's Daily Telegraph:
But there is also speculation that he [Oliver Letwin] will offer to spend more on health and education than Labour to rebut claims that the Tories will starve the public services of extra cash
Flubber.
Now that it seems Saddam Hussain may not in fact have any weapons of mass destruction, Dubya and Blair are being pilloried for having gone to war to oust that particular mass murderous fascist regime.
Sometime in the not too distant future, when it looks like war with North Korea's mass murderous regime is inevitable, Dubya and Blair (or their successors) will be pilloried for threatening war because the North Koreans have weapons of mass destruction.
And it will be the same people doing the pillorying in both cases.
We are being warned that there is an obesity 'timebomb' in Britain (which is to say, as in so many things, we are headed where the USA leads). The great and good of the medical establishment intone in sententious voices that "a far-reaching national strategy is needed" to deal with this.
So we can look forward to the state taking even further control of our very bodily functions, for our own good of course, no doubt starting with the children interned in state's educational conscription centres. But then why the hell should we care about this whole problem? If obesity causes us to fall ill, we have the state's National Health Service to look after us and pick up the tab! If being a porker makes us unhappy, we have the state's social workers to tell us that there is nothing for us to worry about and in any case, how dare anyone utter 'fatists' slurs? Do these nasty doctors calling for "a far-reaching national strategy" not realise that by stigmatizing fat people, they are undoing the work of thousands of Guardian reading self-esteem councilors paid for out of tax money?
The solution to this statist regulatory tangle is to set one part of the social-welfare class again the other in a bitter begger-thy-neighbour "our victims have it worse than your victims" battle to the political death.
We could be on to a winner here... Let the welfare state eat itself.
I'm not fat! I'm a
horizontally challenged victim
of the capitalist system!
There is now a web site for the commission which is to create the implementation plan for the new space policy. We would like to see them relying on private sector developments for transport and for lunar exploration and settlement.
Times are changing. We have a major policy opportunity. We can quite possibly move things in our preferred direction: private operation. Although it is lovely to talk about how we would do space exploration in a perfect libertarian society, we do not live in that world. We have to deal realistically with the hand we have been dealt.
I think we have at least a couple pairs going into this one.
Tuesday
If you thought the use of human guinea pigs in biochemical and other research died with the Nazi's, you had better think again.
Somehow 'axis of evil' doesn't even come close to describing North Korea. I fear we will find nightmares a step beyond even Saddam's hobbies when the place finally collapses. Saddam killed for pleasure and vengeance. He 'only' topped a million or so. From what is leaking out it appears North Korea may be into industrial murder.
PS: Cold Fury has also covered this story and links to the original report.
I have just been working my through a collection of essays by the noted British writer, Theodore Dalrymple, (that is not his real name, from what I can guess), who has spent much of his professional life dealing with muggers, burglars, murderers, drug addicts, the homeless, the variously abused, and other inhabitants of that twilight zone we might generalise as "the underclass". It is a great book, full of harrowing detail, often illuminated by mordant wit and unintended humour.
Dalrymple could, I think, be fairly characterised as a social conservative. That a Britain full of grammar schools, nuclear families and draconian punishments for infractions of the law is his desired state of affairs cannot be in doubt. He subscribes to the view, unless I have misread him, that the social reforms of the 1960s, while perhaps containing some good elements, were taken as a whole a social catastrophe for the working class. But were they? Do we really want, for example, to a return to when homosexuality was a criminal offence? And has some of the loosening of old social taboos been quite the disaster he claims? I am not so sure.
Some of his targets - such as state welfare and education systems - deserve all the muck he heaps on them. But I have problems with the relentlessly gloomy tone of the publication, and this goes, I think, for a lot of commentary one gets to see from the conservative side of the cultural spectrum these days. Apart from the usual hints that we should go back to some sort of social order resembling the 1950s of myth and memory, there is very little in the way to any positive solutions to the ills on display.
What struck me about Dalrymple's book is how different he is from our Victorian forbears. As well as setting out the problem, the generation that brought us the gospel of "self improvement" looked at the ugliness around them and said, more or less, that "it doesn't have to be like this". And they acted.
And it doesn't have to be like this. We have seen, in New York for example, a dramatic fall in violent crime, due to a determined effort at proper policing.
And in that, I think, lies the point that the United States, unlike Britain, has not yet given up. If we are to deal with some of the issues Dalrymple mentions, it will not be enough merely to point out the ugliness around us from the elegant citadels of the Daily Telegraph's editorial offices. We will need to sketch out how we get to a better place. For if we don't, then Dalrymple will become nothing better than a very articulate bore.
There was a nice little post yesterday at Daryl Cobranchi's homeschooling blog:
A teacher's union official has said that g-school teachers are incompetent. I'm sure she didn't mean to but it is the only logical conclusion.1. Teachers are underpaid (according to the union official)
2. "If you don't pay competitive salaries, we're never going to get competent teachers."
Therefore, the current teachers must be incompetent. Q.E.D.
Cruel, but correct.
If you haven't dropped in on Clayton Cramer lately, do so. He has links to more self defense stories per day than I have typically seen in a full year.
Sections of a seventeen page letter likely written by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda lieutenants, have been published in the New York Times. Terrorist leader al-Zarqawi bemoans the lack of support in Iraq:
"Many Iraqis would honor you as a guest and give you refuge, for you are a Muslim brother," according to the document. "However, they will not allow you to make their home a base for operations or a safe house."
Other quotes show how he sees more difficulty in the future:
"The problem is you end up having an army and police connected by lineage, blood and appearance," the document says. "When the Americans withdraw, and they have already started doing that, they get replaced by these agents who are intimately linked to the people of this region.""We can pack up and leave and look for another land, just like what has happened in so many lands of jihad. Our enemy is growing stronger day after day, and its intelligence information increases."
"America, however, has no intention of leaving, no matter how many wounded nor how bloody it becomes."
"By God, this is suffocation!"
More ominously, he talks of his desire to incite sectarian warfare. He would see tens of thousands of Iraqi's die for his macabre politico-religious goals:
"So the solution, and only God knows, is that we need to bring the Shia into the battle," the writer of the document said. "It is the only way to prolong the duration of the fight between the infidels and us. If we succeed in dragging them into a sectarian war, this will awaken the sleepy Sunnis who are fearful of destruction and death at the hands" of Shiites."You noble brothers, leaders of the jihad, we do not consider ourselves people who compete against you, nor would we ever aim to achieve glory for ourselves like you did," the writer says. "So if you agree with it, and are convinced of the idea of killing the perverse sects, we stand ready as an army for you to work under your guidance and yield to your command."
There is just too much of value in this story to convey without redoing the entire article. It is well worth the time to read the entire thing.
I have also intentionally left out a few very interesting admissions...
You know, unlike my proprietor, I'm beginning to warm to Transylvania's very own Michael Howard. But he just keeps failing to take his own thoughts to a natural logical conclusion.
After an ideologically mixed start, particularly with his comments about drugs, and support for his mini-me, David Blunkett, he's still just coming out with platitudes, rather than policies, particularly with his speech yesterday entitled, The British Dream:
Too many are cheated of the decent education that is essential for people to make the best of their lives. Too many are cheated of the first class health care that they deserve. Why? Because we have a State that does too much, that interferes too much, that is too unaccountable.
No Michael, it doesn't interfere too much. It just interferes. If more government can't improve a situation, then surely less government is even better. And where does this logically end up? With no government at all.
Read more.As the economy of Zimbabwe continues its steady collapse into a Mad Max like wasteland under the thuggish tyranny of Robert Mugabe, perhaps we are seeing the first signs of resistance.
The rebellion by 6,000 black workers is the first in nearly four years of state-sponsored terror on the country's white-owned farms. Kondozi's 1,500 profitable acres provide huge quantities of runner beans, mange tout and red peppers for stores including Safeway, Sainsbury's and Tesco.But the minister for agriculture, Joseph Made, wants the business for himself. A few weeks ago, he arrived at the farm with colleagues and ordered out the workers and the white owners. A fortnight later, scores of ruling Zanu-PF party loyalists were sent in but around 200 women workers fought back with broken tiles, stones and broken bricks. Shots were fired, apparently by pro-government thugs, but they were forced to flee. Mr Made was not available for comment.
As I have suggested before regarding the Logistics of Tyranny, if the 'aid lobby' was actually serious about the welfare of people in the Third World generally, and places like Zimbabwe in particular, they would do better to call for ending 90% of all aid payments to the kleptocratic governments that rule them and in place of the remaining 10%, send an equal value of weapons and ammunition to people who actually oppose the regimes keeping Africa from sharing the vast economic improvements elsewhere in the Third World.
One would think that because the vast majority of Mugabe's victims are not white land owners but are in fact the common black people of that woeful nation, this might move even the chattering classes in Islington, Berkeley and Grenwich Village to feel a spot of indigestion over their morning bowl of Muesli and hense to demand 'something be done', but I guess that only applies when the designated 'bad guys' are Jews (or Donald Rumsfeld), not black African socialists.
The only message people like Joseph Made understand weighs 55 grains and moves at about 3,100 feet per second. I do not lightly wish for bloodshed anywhere, but the occasional grimaces of the Guardian reading classes have not stopped the long nightmare of the people of Zimbabwe.
Arm the workers of Kondozi!
A couple truck loads of ammo and one for
these each of the workers of Kondozi and you
will have a real rebellion
Just as the Tory Party (the party that has given us Chris Patten, Edward Heath and Ken Clarke) cannot be counted on to reverse the march into regulatory Euro-statism (they at best slow the rate at which it happens), similarly the Tory reaction to plans by Labour Home Secretary David Blunkett to lower the burden of proof in criminal cases where the state really wants to convict someone is one of essential support.
So... we are left with only one half-way significant party who seems to care even the slightest about civil liberties in the court room: The LibDems. But then again, when it comes to regulatory statism and abridging economic free association in society at large, the LibDems are even more keen than Labour to replace all social interaction with politically derived formulae for just about any kind of behaviour you can think of.
And people wonder why I urge folks not to vote for anyone? So how does one resist the increasingly panoptic regulatory state? Good question.
You would have to be deaf, dumb and blind (or read nothing but the Guardian) to have failed to notice that there is rather a large constituency in Britain whose feelings regarding the European Union lie somewhere between dislike and loathing.
As a consequence this would presumably lead the leader of the opposition Tory Party to firmly align his troops with the Euro-sceptics, correct? I mean, there is no way in hell that he would sign up the Tory Party to be a member of a group within the European 'parliament' who had a charter objective that included "the realisation of a United States of Europe", right?
Anyone who sees the Tory Party the solution to Labour marching Britain into a bureaucratised regulatory pan-European dystopia is deluding themselves. There is opposition to the EU within the Tory Party but they are not the people in charge, and the LibDems are even worse than Labour.
But of course the Tory Party can talk a fine Euro-sceptic game when it suits them, but then they can also talk a fine 'we are the party of low taxation' game when it suits them. It is a delight to hear someone making the moral case against high taxation.
Except of course, 'white man speak with forked tongue'...he does not actually mean it. The Tories talk about the importance of civil society and yet you will look in vain for a list of state functions that the Tory party intends to amputate to actually stop the regulatory gangrene killing off civil society.
Don't support the Tory Party... you will only be encouraging more of the same. And of course if you like the state of civil liberties under 'Big Blunkett', you will just love them under Michael 'a touch of the night' Howard.
Until there is a meaningful choice, do not vote for anyone or you will be deluding yourself that you are making any significant difference.
Friedrich Blowhard's latest and pleasingly whimsical posting is called Visual Google. What he was doing was typing in words, albeit words with visual connotations and consequences. Hello "clouds". Hello "sky".
Says Friedrich:
It may be an exaggeration to describe a Google search as "found art" but I generally like the results at least as well as a John Cage musical composition.
Indeed.
But now here's what I thought Friedrich might have been writing about. For some time now I've been wondering how you search the net for a picture, when all you have to go on is a bit of picture yourself. Suppose you have a rather blurry or unsatisfactory image, or perhaps a fragment of an image, or maybe a quite good drawing of an image, and you want the Giant Computer in the Sky to tell you what it is, and to show you a far, far better version of it … can you now do that? Are there truly visual search engines out there? And how about a visual description ("cubist woman, with transparent handkerchief in front of her face, crying, lots of yellow, red and blue") but not the official title? Can search engines now - or will search engines ever be able to - respond intelligently to a query like that?
And how about music? Can you now, or will there ever be a day when you can, go "you know that thing that goes Dah dah de dah dit kabang swoosh ..." and get five suggestions for the original track listed for you and ready to roll?
I mentioned before that Ireland has an oxymoronically titled Competition Authority. If that level of government intrusion was all we had to worry about, I wouldn't mind too much. Unfortunately we are also saddled with the similarly Orwellian-sounding Equality Authority. Their motto is "Diversity for an Equal Ireland" or "Equality for a Diverse Ireland" or something else equally bland but diversely platitudinous like "Be Reasonable, It Pays!". This bunch of state-stipended, humourless entitlement-enforcers is headed by - some achievement this - probably the most pompous man in Ireland: Niall Crowley. He is an insistent hectoring presence on our radio waves. Through the the op-ed and letters pages of our newspapers he regularly reminds us of our "reponsibilities" in prose laden with jargon, tautologies and sundry infelicities. So it was with delight today that I read Blog Irish's eloquent skewering of this self-serving organisation and supremo.
Amidst the voluminous analysis and comment about the Middle East, the part it played in the Cold War seems seldom mentioned of late. But, from the 1950's right through to the end of the 1980's, the Israeli-Arab conflict was, at least in part, an important Cold War battlefront, fought out between two proxy antagonists.
But, everything old is new again:
The primary goal of the EU is the internationalisation of the conflict in order to underline the need for its own mediating role. Here is the prevailing European view: The longer the conflict continues and the deeper it gets, the more evident is the incapability of the US to moderate a peace process. The EU thus concludes that both sides are in need of - ironically speaking - the good uncle from Europe to resolve this conflict with European democratic and ecological values, its welfare state and civil society. How good for both sides that there is Europe and how bad for the world that one side, and this is Israel, is affording a wild west type of policy in the style of the US.The need for a solution only exists as long as the war continues. This is why the EU does not want the conflict to end before it gains a major role. And this is why the EU does not wish the PA to give up too early and why the EU is strengthening the PA. The EU is getting up to the cynicism of stirring up a conflict that it supposedly wants to see resolved by financing one side. This is the inherently inhuman purpose of EU humanitarian aid in the region. The Palestinians are playing the ugly role of being the cannon fodder for Europe's hidden war against the US. It can be noted on the sidethat this is not considered an anti-Arab policy by those who otherwise easily use this word.
This is an excerpt from a longish but thoroughly fascinating article written by German Green MEP, Ilke Schroder. If she is correct (and I must say that the facts on the ground do somewhat bear her out) then it appears as if the European Union has stepped into the role once played by the old Soviet Union.
Monday
There is a sense in which I pity this government. No, really I do. When someone is prepared to exploit any sort of human tragedy in order to get what they want, one is forced to conclude that they have very little left in the way of self-respect or decency.
I don't think any of us truly appreciate just how badly our Home Secretary, David Blunkett, wants a national ID card system but the desire must be intense enough to burn a hole in his soul. It has now got to the stage where there is no bad news too pathetic enough not to be manipulated into a ID card propoganda opportunity, be it a shooting in Shropshire, a murder in Manchester or a child-abduction in Cheltenham.
The latest ghastly incident to be turned into a government rhetorical tool is the 19 illegal Chinese immigrants who were drowned off the coast of Lancashire over the weekend:
A coroner has set up a commission to identify all the mainly Chinese cockle pickers who died after being caught by high tides - but none have been named.A group of more than 30 cocklers were trapped by rising water in the Hest Bank area of the Lancashire bay on Thursday night.
Alongside the calls for 'more regulation' (the chief reflexive response), Mr Blunkett popped up on the late evening news (sorry, no link) in a laughable attempt to persuade everyone that a national ID card would prevent this sort of thing happening again.
Complete and utter rubbish, of course. But that does not matter. What matters is the drip-drip propoganda required to facilitate 'acculturation'.
Mr Blunkett and his underlings must trawl through the daily news bulletins desperately seeking the kind of heartstring-tugging stories that they use to piggy-back their pet project into the public realm. Like teenage crack-whores, there is no part of their dignity these people will not sacrifice in order to get their fix. How sad, how pathetic.
Robert E. Howard's pulp fiction does not appear to be the stalwart stronghold of libertarianism that one would expect from an Ayn Rand or L. Neil Smith. Nevertheless, writing in Texas when the Wild West was a living memory, not a history book, Howard found plenty of material for his fantasies. The battles of the Aquilonians and the Picts were an odd Old World confection of cowboys and Indians.
The American values of small government and individual freedom have very little to do with Conan's lax attitude towards property, usually appropriated after cleaving a few skulls. However, as King Of Aquilonia, Conan employed his own brand of statecraft, as he explains to Amalrus, King of Ophir, Strabonus, King of Koth and Tsotha the Wizard as he stands chained and defeated in their hall.
From 'The Scarlet Citadel' by Robert E. Howard.
I found Aquilonia in the grip of a pig like you - one who traced his genealogy for a thousand years. The land was torn with the wars of the barons and the people cried out under suppression and taxation. Today no Aquilonian noble dares maltreat the humblest of my subjects, and the taxes of my people are lighter than anywhere else in the world. What of you? Your brother, Amalrus, hold the eastern half of your kingdom and defies you. And you, Strabonus, your soldiers are even now besieging castles of a dozen or more rebellious barons. The people of both your kingdoms are crushed into the earth by tyrannous taxes and levies, And you would loot mine -ha! Free my hands and I'll varnish this floor with your brains!
May all those who raise taxes share the same fate!
This has no connection with legalising drugs, abolishing income tax (see posting below) or the Samizdata.net metacontext, or no connection that I can now think of. But even so, I like it a lot:
Researchers have cracked the puzzle of how pigeons find their way home: they just follow the main roads.…
Some pigeons stick so rigidly to the roads that they even fly round roundabouts before choosing the exit to lead them back to their lofts.
Animal behaviouralists at Oxford University are stunned by their findings, which follow 10 years of research into homing pigeons. For the last 18 months they have used the latest global-positioning technology, allowing them to track the ground the birds covered to within one to four metres.
I too am stunned, even though I am not an "animal behaviouralist". Apparently pigeons do have an innate navigation system, but as soon as they identify a road-based route, they use that instead.
"Up until now, we have always thought about the way that birds go in terms of the energetics of the flight efficiency, which is the most direct route home ... as in the phrase 'as the crow flies'."But the answer is, they don't go as the crow flies, and neither, it is my hunch, do crows. …"
No mate. Crows use the latest global-positioning technology.
I do not know who David Butcher is, but I like him already on the strength of this, that he wrote in the latest Radio Times – which is published, be it noted, by the BBC. It is part of a plug for a programme to be broadcast tonight on BBC2 at 8 pm:
Having enjoyably milked all the clichés about olden times in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Terry Jones makes up for it here. The idea is to put the record straight by presenting portraits of how real life would have been for eight medieval archetypes, starting tonight with the dirty and downtrodden figure of the peasant.The gist is that things weren't nearly as bad for feudal serfs as received history and Monty Python films would have you believe. For a start, they had 80 days' holiday a year, thanks to all those church feast days. And although they were forced to work 50 or so days in a year for their feudal lord, that's rather less than most of us today work to pay our income tax. By the end of the programme, you may be feeling almost envious.
Well that may be going too far, but I do like that bit there about income tax, measured in days per year. And I bet these guys will be pleased about this kind of talk too.
On a long drive, this morning, I came across an interesting piece on Andrew Marr's Start the Week programme on BBC Radio Four, a radio station I still cannot quite give up. The thrust of the piece was that free market producers in London's West End are creating shockingly 'commercial' and 'unoriginal' shows, and that something should be done about it to make life more interesting for London's chattering classes.
Read more.Sunday
The reason that there has been relatively little output this evening is that many of the Samizdatistas were at Samizdata HQ rather than at their keyboards, celebrating the start of new business ventures by two of our number...
There was a documentary about the Royal Navy in WWII on tonight, and one image etched itself into my mind. With a sidescan sonar they found the wreck of the Ark Royal, and along the debris path there was an unmistakeable outline.
A Fairey Swordfish!
This is not just any Fairey Swordfish. This is one of the survivors of Bismark torpedo raids of May 1941. It is sitting at the bottom of the Mediterranean, certainly with all the fabric gone, but still sufficiently intact to give image enough for type recognition.
My mind is boggled at the find and I still find it hard to believe.
I simply cannot wait until someone figures out how to recover it. And if there is one, there might be more. Who knows? Perhaps the very plane that doomed the Bismark will one day grace the Imperial War Museum.
click for larger image
Medical researchers have condemned the new Human Tissues Bill as an impediment to teaching and research.
But scientists say the changes go too far and will make teaching and medical research extremely difficult.There is no discrimination between whole organs and a collection of a few cells on a microscope slide, they say.
Cancer charities and the Wellcome Trust are calling on ministers to make changes to the Bill.
Doctors have to obtain written consent if they wish to use any form of human tissue removed from a person living or dead, even if they are checking for the prevalence of a virus in the general population. One can think of the consequences if tests could not have been carried out for AIDS, given the level of stigmatisation that accompanied the virus. There is a quandary since informed consent is surely necessary before the tissues of any individual are extracted, preserved and used for any purpose, even if it is for public health.
However, it is estimated that 3,000,000 samples and 100,000,000 blood samples will require written consent, proving another bureaucratic excess for the NHS. Public health is often used as an argument to override the concerns or refusal of an individual to provide any form of sample. No doubt there is an argument that rational individuals will understand the necessity of acting in concert when faced with an unknown disease or epidemic. However, this is often not the case.
Grappling with the issue of public health and a libertarian society, certain questions have presented themselves: Do individuals who refuse to cooperate with ventures sourced in civil society to track and curb the spread of any disease in a minarchy open themselves to claims of compensation since their actions could be viewed as endangering others? At such times, is the action of 'opting out' of a collective venture to track and curb an epidemic by any individual sufficient to trigger claims against that individual on the grounds that their actions placed others in danger?
Perry de Havilland has limited the notion of public health to "communicable diseases", but even here, it is unclear if such matters require a coercive authority mandated to use the measures necessary to curb any disease. As it stands, the new Human Tissues Law will require written consent before any part of your body is taken and used for another purpose, even if it is in your own interest. Surely an advance on the contemporary thefts by state institutions in the name of 'research'.
I don't make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts
- Will Rogers
There is an interesting story in the Telegraph about a teenage Afghan arrested as a Taliban supporter and held in Guantanamo Bay. Although he was none too happy about being taken away from his parents, rather surprisingly he claims that he had a good time in the US military prison!
In a first interview with any of the three juveniles held by the US at Guantanamo Bay base, Mohammed said: "They gave me a good time in Cuba. They were very nice to me, giving me English lessons." Mohammed, an unemployed Afghan farmer, found the surroundings in Cuba at first baffling. After he settled in, however, he was left to enjoy stimulating school work, good food and prayer.
What a funny old world.
MommaBear links to several recent articles on the increasingly revolutionary situation in Iran.
A mouthpiece for the ruling Mullahs has stated resigning members of government will be treated as criminals under Islamic law. With large numbers of popular leaders now out of government the next election looks to be a very weak and sad affair of limited public credibility. After the election? The deluge perhaps.
They have tied the steam relief valve shut. There is nowhere for dissent in Iran to go now. Pressure can only build until it explodes onto the streets of Tehran. The question is whether the Mullahs will begin 'the Terror' before or after the explosion.
