Curiouser and Curiouser! on the-state

Russian state continues to murder it's own

Mon, 28 Oct 2002 21:54:49 +0000

West backs Russia over rescue tactics. The US and Britain rally behind President Putin as controversy continues over his soldiers' tactics in ending the Moscow hostage crisis. [BBC News | WORLD]

» I have my qualms about the tacits used to rescue the hostages that survived the siege. But okay I can understand why you break a siege.

What I find unconscionable is the Russian authorities refusal to aid the doctors treating the victims by either identifying the gas used or providing an antidote. The official stating "in normal conditions would not lead to lethal results", well, with over a hundred dead from poisoning so far I would have thought he would choke on his own words. Why not ship them to a military hospital and treat them there?

And what could the security reasons be? Terrorists already have an arsenal of deadly gases at their commands so it's not them the information is being hidden from. The only thing I can conclude is that it's a gas that they shouldn't have been using and it would be an embarrassing admission.

Portland will be the template

Thu, 02 Jan 2003 10:30:28 +0000

back in the .... It was twenty years ago that I visited my first communist country. In 1982, I trekked through most of Eastern Europe, and a bit of the Soviet Union. I can still remember well the terror at the border to East Germany, when guards searched every inch of my bags before letting me pass. They even forced me to remove my shoes! (The last time that happened to me was, well, I guess SFO.) A Russian woman on the train told me: "Don't worry. As long as you stay on the path, you're fine. It's only people who slip off the path who fall into the abyss." "The abyss." I was reminded of that story on my last trip to a communist country. My wife and I just returned from China. The reminder, however, was not the behavior of the Chinese border guards. Indeed, getting through customs and onto a plane there is like it was in the US 20 years ago -- relaxed, respectful, easy, and you even get to keep your shoes. I was reminded instead by the Portland airport story that has been popped in blog space. Stay on the path, and you're safe. Slip, and you're in the abyss. People -- on both the left and right -- boil in this space about what's happening outside. Yet outside blog space, there is just more of the same. The Times writes about Democratic hopefuls rallying to attack Bush for not making America safe enough. Wonderful. Who ever wins in 2004, we can be assured of more petty fascism to keep America safe. Where is the candidate who asks: Must we sell our soul to win this "war"? Where is the political party that demands respect for principles that I thought were fundamental. If we must detain Arabs, must we do so inhumanely? If we must frisk every air traveler, can't we at least build in checks to the system to assure that it is not abused? If we must fight to defend America, can it at least be America that we defend? I'm all with Dave that this space will be the space for political action in the future. If only the future comes soon enough. [Lessig Blog]

The Portland airport story is indeed a frightening example of the witches brew of petty beauracracy and police state powers. It's a reminder that we shouldn't have given guns to people with small minds and it's frightening precisely because we can all put ourselves in that situation and know it might easily have been us.

This anti-terrorism kick is all about state power. As corporations rob the state of it's social & commercial powers what has it left to do except flex it's muscles and remind us whose in charge?

Now I don't really know what kind of man Mr. Bush is, but I have my suspicions based on the evidence (mainly reporting) available to me. I think he is an ambitious, clever, devious, ignorant and mean spirited individual. He is used to privilege and influence helping him to get his way.

According to dictionary.com:

fascism: A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.

War against Peace

Tue, 07 Jan 2003 09:36:27 +0000

I've recently begun reading articles from the site LewRockwell.com. I don't remember how I came across the site, nor what drew me to it. But, as someone who regards himself as an uneducated libertarian, I found something that drew me in.

I certainly don't agree with every piece I've read on the site or even with everything said in a piece I broadly agree with. But I find it interesting and stimulating. Today I read "The War Against Life" by a gentleman called Butler Shaffer. Here is a taster:

It is interesting to observe so many Americans trying to find "meaning" in the Bush administrations war against an endless parade of "enemies." From Afghanistan to Iraq to North Korea, the state continues to concoct "threats" for the consumption of a public that is neither empirically nor analytically demanding. The media are quick to play their assigned roles, providing state-generated "information" and self-styled "experts" to convince the rest of us that everything the White House tells us is "just so," and that anyone who dissents from or even questions the states purposes or policies is likely an apologist for terrorism!

and a summary:

From Afghanistan to Iraq to North Korea, the state continues to concoct "threats" for the consumption of a public that is neither empirically nor analytically demanding.
The state's ability to gull most of its citizens into an acceptance of politically defined reality has been made possible by one of the few successful state institutions: the government school system.
Contrary to those who look upon government schools as failures, I have long regarded them as shining accomplishments for state purposes: to produce herd-oriented men and women incapable of making independent judgments, and who are thus prepared to submit to external authorities for direction in their lives.
While the bald eagle does represent the predatory nature of the state, I believe it is time to adopt a national symbol that more accurately reflects the mindset of most Americans: the parrot!
Much of the explanation, I suspect, is to be found in our sense of fear: both of ourselves and others.
That question was the subject of inquiry for a book, published in 1967, titled Report From Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace.
We must understand all of politics -- no matter in what nation it is practiced -- as a system that wars against the very nature of life.

The insanity of the state

Thu, 27 Feb 2003 08:49:55 +0000

Another stimulating piece by Butler Shafer (my summary, the whole article is better):

And now we find Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, and George Bush being referred to as "madmen" by one faction or another, depending upon which side of the battlefield you are on.

Confining our focus on the demented state of mind of tyrants and war-lovers is to overlook the more important consideration: the insanity of the state itself. After pointing out to my students how FDR manipulated the Japanese into an attack on Pearl Harbor in order to get America into World War II, I often hear the response "our government wouldnt do that!"

The courts, a branch of the state, have provided a fairly consistent expansion of the allegedly "limited" powers granted to the state, and a restrictive definition of the "rights" it was the announced purpose of this scheme to "protect."

If the state enjoys a monopoly on the use of force, and there is no device or principle that can restrain the scope of such authority, what would we expect government officials to do with such power? Much what we would expect a group of children to do if a bowl of candy was placed before them: grab as much of it as they can!

It should be evident to any thoughtful person that politics mobilizes the most vicious, socially destructive attitudes and practices known to mankind. The state represents the "dark side" of the human character, and so we are disinclined to stare it in the face, out of a fear that we might see something of ourselves reflected back.

If the United States has created chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, we will go to war with Iraq for allegedly trying to acquire such weapons for themselves. America will condemn North Korea for having nuclear missiles, even though the United States is the only country in history that has actually used such weapons against civilian populations!

No matter how strong or deserving the criticism of any foreign regime, statists can never allow the censure to rise to the level of an attack upon the idea of the state itself.

And so it is that the Hitlers, Stalins, Maos, Pol Pots, and other tyrants, must be marginalized and isolated as aberrations of an otherwise wondrous system. What better way of accomplishing such state-saving ends than to declare them to be "madmen," "crazed lunatics" who managed to get into power by some untoward means?

In the language of "chaos" theory, the state becomes an "attractor" for the kinds of people who are disposed to use violence and intimidation against others; people who are willing to exploit the sociopathic nature of all political systems.

[From LewRockwell.com]

Open State

Fri, 28 Feb 2003 19:16:10 +0000

Open Source Government?. The question then becomes, what kinds of constitutional structures are appropriate to furthering the stated aims in an internetworked, interdependent... [The Obvious?]

What a good question.

The slippery slope

Thu, 03 Apr 2003 23:57:29 +0100

Intel consultant detained without being accused of a crime. No right to a lawyer. No chance to see the evidence against him. Secret proceedings. Covered here. What country do... [BookBlog]

Slippery slopes are... well... slippery.

I didn't like that movie either...

Mon, 07 Apr 2003 16:18:58 +0100

Trooper-style citizenship as Heinlein satirizes is a condition that sounds free and honorable but is actually impossible to exercise with free will or honor. A recent article on posthumous citizenship for some non-American soldiers speaks volumes when it notes that the citizenship is not real or practical, but symbolic. It suggests citizenship may be most meaningful to the dead, the static, the non-thinking.

Heinleins citizenship is granted for soldiers who have made it through boot camp, where they have learned not to question authority, to follow all orders from above instantly and exactly, and who have no other allegiance than to the all-wise central state. It is a Rumsfeldian vision of citizenship. It is a citizenship where each moral compass is not individually discovered, tested and mapped, but instead simply imprinted. It must be because "Man has no moral instinct."

[From LewRockwell.com]

Recently retired USAF lieutenant colonel Karen Kwiatkowski compares the Bush/Rumsfeld doctrine to Robert Heinlein's vision in Starship Troopers and finds some uncomfortable similarities.

And throw him to the floor sir?

Thu, 17 Apr 2003 17:26:17 +0100

Your glow stick could land you in jail. The latest incarnation of the RAVE Act punishes drug users and bystanders alike -- and tramples civil liberties. [Salon.com]

All together now... "Land of the Free, Home of the Brave."

The world that PKD made

Wed, 30 Apr 2003 17:00:54 +0100

Free Country?.

Patriot Raid....
A security 'mistake' has the author eating dinner at gunpoint.
Patriot Raid
[...] "You have no right to hold us," Asher insisted.

"Yes, we have every right," responded one of the agents. "You are being held under the Patriot Act following suspicion under an internal Homeland Security investigation." [...]

Three days later I phoned the restaurant to discover what happened. The owner was nervous and embarrassed and obviously did not want to talk about it. But I managed to ascertain that the whole thing had been one giant mistake. A mistake. Loaded guns pointed in faces, people made to crawl on their hands and knees, police officers clearly exacerbating a tense situation by kicking in doors, taunting, keeping their fingers on the trigger even after the situation was under control. A mistake. And, according to the ACLU a perfectly legal one, thanks to the Patriot Act. [...]
[Ye Olde Phart]

[b.cognosco]

The text of this article made for pretty scary reading -- though not, I'm sure, half as scary as being there and, still less, being one of the poor bastards who didn't get an apology.

Of course you guys can expect a lot more, and a lot worse, of this type of thing. Patriot II may have been temporarily derailed but you can see it has the full backing of this neocon administration and they have proved themselves adroit at manipulating events to their advantage.

Whenever power can be wielded freely, and without responsibility, corruption is never far behind. Expect a big growth in the powers and budget of Homeland security, probably fuelled by an imminent danger of some kind (which may or may not come).

The USA is beginning to sound like the world that Philip K. Dick made.

I wouldn't trust him to tie his own shoelaces

Fri, 02 May 2003 15:32:04 +0100

Plan to Protect USA Patriot Act. Interesting view, by Andrew Glass of The Hill, on Ashcroft's politically astute plan to keep USA Patriot alive, hidden, and safe from exposure. Hill says Ashcroft, sensing a real problem with his heavy-handed use of USA Patriot, did the following (some background on Sensenbrenner):

Ashcroft has been in Congress and politics a long time. He's a sneaky SOB, grown adept at hiding his political motives and actions from his constituents, and he now has the benefit of an unelected position with no answerability to voters. If Ashcroft gets his way and the (already marginal) sunset provisions of Patriot are killed we are in for a long, sad period in US history.

thehill.com - We're watching you: national security and privacy issues.
[...] Last summer, Sensenbrenner and committee's ranking Democrat, John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, asked the department for basic statistical data about how it was using its powerful new surveillance tools.

The department stalled for so long that Sensenbrenner threatened to subpoena Attorney General John Ashcroft and to oppose renewing the act.

Sensenbrenner reported to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that he had told Ashcroft: "If you want to play I've got a secret, good luck getting the PATRIOT Act extended. Because if you've got bipartisan anger in the Congress, the sunset will come and go and the PATRIOT Act disappears."

Beating a tactical retreat, Ashcroft thereupon launched a three-pronged damage-control effort.
[Privacy Digest]

[b.cognosco]

If you guys know what's good for you, you'll keep a watchful eye on John Ashcroft and his henchgoons and keep lobbying your representatives to end the Patriot Act as soon as possible.

The gulf of Baghdad incident

Wed, 21 Jan 2004 09:03:28 +0000

...
It is also odd that opponents of conspiracy theories often allow that conspiracies have occurred in the past, but refuse to contemplate their existence in the present. For some reason, you are bordering on the bonkers if you wonder about the truth behind events like 9/11, when it is established as fact that in 1962 the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Lyman L. Lemnitzer, tried to convince President Kennedy to authorise an attack on John Glenns rocket, or on a US navy vessel, to provide a pretext for invading Cuba. Two years later, a similar strategy was deployed in the faked Gulf of Tonkin incident, when US engagement in Vietnam was justified in the light of the false allegation that the North Vietnamese had launched an unprovoked attack on a US destroyer. Are such tactics confined to history? Paul ONeill, George Bushs former Treasury Secretary, has just revealed that the White House decided to get rid of Saddam eight months before 9/11.
...
[The Spectator]

I thought this was well put. We have a wealth of evidence that suggest that our governments routinely lie to us and engage in activities which are in the best interests only of vested interests and yet, seemingly, people won't accept it and act upon it.

Not the 9 o'clock whitewash

Fri, 30 Jan 2004 08:33:26 +0000

With his safe pair of hands Lord Hutton would make a fine chairman of the governors of the BBC (he's even a Lord unlike that lefty Gavyn Davies!) And with his pedigree as Director of Communications and friend of President Tony who better than Alistair Campbell as the new DG. Job done!

To support my conclusions I offer the following evidence and witness statements:

It is not caving in to the bees to stop poking a stick into their hive.

Wed, 17 Mar 2004 10:49:34 +0000

I've just read a very powerful article by Lew Rockwell which is the first article I've read that resonates with how I feel about this whole pre-9/11, post-9/11, Iraq War, American Empire, Madrid, Terrorism mess we've gotten ourselves into.

After the bombing, Spaniards didn't shout: "They hate us because we are good!" or "Spain is Number One!" or otherwise pledge their religious devotion to the consolidated Spanish state. Not at all. Instead, they said: that jerk at the top brought this on, because he sold out the nation to appease the Bush administration. There was no Spanish Patriot Act, no creation of a Department of Homeland Security. Instead, there was a wave of good sense which amounted to the following: let's stop making these people mad by invading and occupying their country.

...

Americans have somehow come to believe that all acts of terrorism must result in a bigger government. As a result, we have just come to accept the idea that the government will get away with ever more violations of our liberties. In the Spanish case, however, the terror act may result in diminishing government power. This is wholly justified, just as bee stings should teach a person not to agitate them without reason. It is not caving in to the bees to stop poking a stick into their hive.

...

Why didn't Americans respond similarly after 9-11? The intellectual elites of both parties and all approved political ideologies agreed to impose a taboo in the days following the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. That taboo was against discussing the events outside the vacuum of that one day. We were all supposed to pretend that the United States government was 100% pure and innocent and had never done anything to anyone.

Incredibly, this was a plausible scenario to many Americans, who had no clue that the US was directly responsible for perhaps a million plus deaths of children in Iraq with its sanctions policies (according to the UN but say it's half that for the sake of argument; it makes no difference). Americans are also famously ignorant of Islamic concerns about Infidels With Guns running around in Mecca.

Boil me slowly

Wed, 24 Mar 2004 06:54:02 +0000

I've just realised I'm a frog.

In a pan of water

Is it me or is it getter warmer in here?

"I don't remember"

Sat, 27 Mar 2004 09:47:10 +0000

Thought provoking piece, from the Future of Freedom Foundation, about the use of "I don't remember" as a way of avoiding the truth (good or bad) and about how it is being used now by members of the Bush administration.

Getting golden conduct out of leaden instincts

Tue, 30 Mar 2004 13:37:55 +0100

Great article by Butler Shafer Utopia and Reality:

If you seek perfection, my advice is to study mathematics. Otherwise, as the study of economics suggests, learn to evaluate options on the basis of comparative advantages. But, in doing so, be certain you are considering all the costs and benefits of your actions; the long-term as well as the short-term; the psychological and spiritual as well as the material. Do you endorse political programs because you truly consider them more beneficial than non-political ones, or have you simply failed to account for many of the costs of such programs, costs which their authors prefer to keep hidden from your calculations?

...

The diamond may serve as a useful metaphor for the design of social systems grounded in the connected, horizontally-based strength of their members, rather than in vertical power structures. The Amish who have no coercive political organization and who embrace the private ownership of property know what we have long since forgotten: politics divides us and, in so doing, weakens our social connectedness. Political systems set group against group, engendering a distrust of everyone except, of course, political leaders. By such means, the networks that would otherwise connect us to one another as we pursue our various self-interests, become cleaved.

...

Those who persist in trying to breathe life into dead horses are the real utopians. The political structuring of society has long been grounded in pie-in-the-sky fantasies that power-hungry men and women can make us better than we are; that ever-more sophisticated weapons of death and destruction can bring peace to the world; and that, in the words of Herbert Spencer, there is a "political alchemy by which you can get golden conduct out of leaden instincts." As our formal world continues to disintegrate before us, it is time that we abandon the utopian fictions in which we are conditioned and face the stark reality that whatever future we have will be decided by the content of our thinking. Because only you and I are in control of and, thus, responsible for our thinking, only you and I are capable of bringing order to our world.

All's well in Iraq. Nothing to see here folks. Move along now.

Wed, 21 Apr 2004 19:45:34 +0100

Tracking the spoils of war

Greenspan tells Congress rates will rise

Fables of the Iraqi reconstruction

At least 3 killed by tornado in Illinois

Nine killed in Saudi car bomb explosions

Suicide car bombs kill 68 in Basra, Iraq

$700 million here, $700 million there

Burning through money in Iraq

[From a day in Salon]

I can almost hear the cheering from here...

The dossier of private information is the badge of the totalitarian state

Fri, 30 Apr 2004 13:44:35 +0100

ID cards to use 'key database' of personal info. Blunkett blanket trawl By John Lettice . [The Register]

This whole "biometic-ID cards will save our asses" stuff thing is a lot of old hooey.

Organized criminals will, as they always have, use their financial muscle and, where necessary, blackmail, to get valid ID's or insert phoney data into the system. If anything happens to go wrong with your data you, the ordinary blighted citizen, will be screwed since the government will argue that nothing can go wrong.

In this age of decentralization the governments big idea is to put all the data into one big centralized database? I think it's amazing, amazingly stupid that is.

And let's just consider for a second how responsible we think they'll be with this new toy:

"Of course the state should have, on occasions, the right to information about individuals," he says. "But what safety measures have been put in place? This is not paranoia about being found out. It's a reasonable concern in a democratic society. This government has proved as bad as any other in terms of protecting rights of privacy." [The Guardian]

and:

As long ago as 1990, Sir Nicholas, then a senior high court judge, now a law lord, warned: "If the information obtained by the police, the Inland Revenue, the social security services, the health service and other agencies were to be gathered together in one file, the freedom of the individual would be gravely at risk. The dossier of private information is the badge of the totalitarian state." [The Guardian]

Giving the government more powers doesn't work. Haven't we learned that yet? They keep telling us how with a little more power they can fix the problem... they've been telling me that for the last 32 years. Has it worked? I think it's time for a change and it starts with saying no to Blunketts latest stupidity.

What kind of crummy Marxism is this?

Sat, 01 May 2004 10:08:04 +0100

Can you imagine this? Here are a bunch of commies who are offering sweetheart tax breaks to Western companies. Low taxes benefit business. Arent commies supposed to be anti-business? I mean, what kind of crummy Marxism is this?

Other executives complained bitterly that the Department of Homeland Security is making it so hard for legitimate foreigners to get visas to study or work in America that many have given up the age-old dream of coming here. Instead, they are studying in England and other Western European nations, and even China. This is leading to a twofold disaster.

First, one of Americas greatest assets its ability to skim the cream off the first-round intellectual draft choices from around the world and bring them to our shores to innovate will be diminished, and that in turn will shrink our talent pool. And second, we could lose a whole generation of foreigners who would normally come here to study, and then would take American ideas and American relationships back home. In a decade we will feel that loss in Americas standing around the world.

Still others pointed out that the percentage of Americans graduating with bachelors degrees in science and engineering is less than half of the comparable percentage in China and Japan, and that U.S. government investments are flagging in basic research in physics, chemistry and engineering. Anyone who thinks that all the Indian and Chinese techies are doing is answering call-center phones or solving tech problems for Dell customers is sadly mistaken. U.S. firms are moving serious research and development to India and China.

Friedman concludes: "We have got to get our focus back in balance, not to mention our budget. We cant wage war on income taxes and terrorism and a war for innovation at the same time." Call this "the education of Thomas Friedman." Who knows? Maybe this perspective will actually have some influence on the editorial page of the New York Times. But dont bet your pension money on this possibility. [Gary North via LewRockwell.com]

A snippet from Gary North's latest piece on the developing relationship between Eastern and Western economies. I usually enjoy his perspectives as well as his prose.

More and more my view is that our conservative governments are a millstone around our necks. They don't understand the flow of events around them and yet they seek to control them, grabbing whatever powers they need to do it. In the process they are damaging us all and we are letting them.

You don't have to look to hard to see the consequences.

You think it won't happen to you? It will happen to someone...

Tue, 11 May 2004 23:09:17 +0100

He was, for example, unaware of the biometric technology's influence on his case until 2002, and prior to this had come up with some decidedly paranoid theories to explain why his life was being destroyed because of a traffic violation. As indeed, you might. [DHS and UK ID card biometric vendor in false ID lawsuit - The Register]

Of course the government will argue that this type of flaw will never be possible in their system (just like the way the banks always argue that the ATM system is flawless, only more so). This is the government we are talking about. We should know better.

So before you nod your head about how good an idea all this biometric ID card shit is, just think for a moment about this happening here. Maybe it won't happen to lots of people, perhaps just a good friend of yours, or maybe your daughter, or maybe even you.

Good luck getting your life back.

Mistaken Identity

Fri, 14 May 2004 17:36:08 +0100

The Stand are stepping up to the plate on ID Card starting with an event on May 19th

Mistaken Identity

A public meeting on the Governments proposed National Identity Card

Wednesday May 19, 2004; 13:3017:00 hrs

The Old Theatre, London School of Economics
Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE

Organised by Privacy International, in association with Liberty, Statewatch, Stand.org.uk, The Register, The 1990 Trust and the Foundation for Information Policy Research. Hosted by the Department of Information Systems of the London School of Economics

The government has introduced draft legislation for a national identity card. The card system will cost at least £3 billion and is likely to become an essential part of life for everyone residing in the UK.

If the draft legislation is accepted by Parliament, everyone will be required to register for a card. Biometric scans of the face, fingers and eye will be taken. Personal details will be stored in a central database. A unique number will be issued that will become the basis for the matching of computer systems.

The proposed card may be required to access vital public services and to receive benefits. The government proposes to enforce the programme through numerous new criminal and civil offenses, including provision for unlimited financial penalty and up to ten years' imprisonment.

The implications for everyone in the UK are far-reaching.

Join us at this important meeting to hear from key figures in the fields of law, politics, security, technology and human rights. Decide for yourself whether this is a plan that should be supported.

The meeting is free of charge.

I'll be going and I hope lots of other people will as well.

What government is all about

Wed, 19 May 2004 12:12:12 +0100

ID card backlash: is the poll tax effect kicking in?. Large numbers prepared for demos, even prison By John Lettice . [The Register]

The governments ID card scheme will, inevitably, lead to compuslory requirement to carry backed by prison & fines. It will inevitably lead to us registering our changes of address backed by prison & fines. It will inevitably lead to large central databases holding information about us which will be inaccurate & poorly managed. It will inevitably lead to corruption and malpractice. It will have minimal positive impact in the areas the government will claim. It will also cost us a fortune to install and maintain. This is, after all, what government is all about.

Lock up your journalists

Tue, 15 Jun 2004 15:51:22 +0100

Reporters in chains. Under Homeland Security orders, journalists from England, Sweden, Holland and other friendly countries are being detained at U.S. airports, strip-searched and deported. [Salon.com]

"Most countries that require special visas for journalists tend to be totalitarian states." said Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

As I read Elena Lappin's story I found myself becoming very angry at the way she was treated both personally and in a more abstract sense. I would say that, if this was a report about how UK immigration had behaved, I would feel disgusted right now.

Though my experience was far removed from the images of real torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, it was also, as one American friend put it, "conceptually related", at distant ends of the same continuum and dictated by a disregard for the humanity of those deemed "in the wrong". American bloggers and journalists would later see my experience as reflecting the current malaise in the country. Dennis Roddy wrote in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: "Our enemies are now more important to us than our friends ... Much of the obsession with homeland security seems to turn on the idea of the world infecting the US."

For all of us hostile aliens I guess this puts the whole "blogging as journalism" debate in a new light doesn't it?

These would have been comforting thoughts the following morning when I was driven back (in handcuffs, of course) to the communal detention room at LAX, and spent hours waiting, without food, while the guards munched enormous breakfasts and slurped hot morning drinks (detainees are not allowed tea or coffee). I incurred the wrath of the boss when I insisted on edible food. "I'm in charge in here. Do you know who you are? Do you know where you are? This isn't a hotel," he screamed.

The Salon piece ends with a good question:

The other unanswered question is: Whose idea was it to crack down on the supposed menace of invading foreign media hordes. "The Bush administration doesn't like the press?" Goldberg asked rhetorically. "That's the best I can come up with, frankly. They've been reluctant for almost four years now to give information out to the press. They don't deal with the press on a level playing field. They've made life hard on other civil liberties. I can't imagine them bending over backward to help the press."

What else do they got?

Tue, 15 Jun 2004 19:45:23 +0100

Recycling weak evidence for war [Salon.com]

Nothing is what.

A long ramble about law & terrorism

Wed, 23 Jun 2004 09:17:53 +0100

My thoughts this morning were triggered by a piece about the dissolution of attorney-client privilege in the US.

Faced with the threat of being declared uncooperative, KPMG announced that it would pay its employees legal fees only if they waived the attorney-client privilege and "cooperated" with the investigation. Invariably, "cooperation" requires self-incrimination and negotiation of a guilty plea. By making it impossible for a defendant to defend, the government never has to have a real case.

I think I've said before that I don't trust my government. It's not that I think the government is actively hostile towards me, but that I think it has no regard for my life, liberty, or prosperity whilst persuing its own agenda. The state, as an entity, is becoming more important than the individuals it's supposed to serve. I think that the way my government has acquiesced to America's actions in Guantanamo Bay clearly demonstrates that.

There may be trouble ahead
But while there's moonlight and music and love and romance
Let's face the music and dance

So what is my fear? My fear is to wake up one day in a fascist country. Fascism places the state foremost. The country does not serve the citizen; the citizen serves the country. Fascism does not recognize the idea of the independence of the common man. Now I am not suggesting that the US or UK is a fascist country now or that it's just around the corner. What I am suggesting is that the legal system is a good barometer for detecting this sort of change and I see stormy weather ahead.

In the last 12 months I've read a lot about how the American legal system is, and has been, deteriorating. About the ways that "Department of Justice" (sic) with the complicity of the rest of the government has made the USA into a prosecutors paradise. A prime example is the use of the RICO legislation. Passed in the 1970 the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act was intended to destroy the Mafia. And for about a decade it was used for that purpose. However by the 1990's prosecutors were using RICO against individuals, businesses, political protest groups, and terrorist organizations. Because so-called Mafiosos were considered to be murderous and ruthless, RICO was created to be equally ruthless. Those accused under RICO could find their assets seized and be unable to pay for their defence. Used this way RICO is the prosecutorial equivalent of the Hydrogen bomb.

There may be teardrops to shed
So while there's moonlight and music and love and romance
Let's face the music and dance

What concerns me is how, in both the US and the UK, the "War on Terror" is being used to hand more power, with less accountability, to the state. "The law is too soft" is the constant refrain from government ministers seeking new, and ever more draconian, powers. Powers which, sooner or later, get pointed at the rest of us. Meanwhile the state continues to act in a way that seems almost calculated to extend the threat of terrorism forever. But anyone who suggests that terrorism is the new communism (i.e. the most direct way of funnelling money to people in the arms industry) must, of course, be parnaoid.

I think there needs to ba full debate about what it means to be a citizen in our society. A debate which spells out the freedoms and protections we enjoy and attempts to understand how those can be balanced with the responsibilites we bear. That includes responsibility for the actions of the state. I believe that a sane outcome would be a re-establishment of fairness in law and a severe curtailment of the power of the state to meddle in the affairs of others. Maybe if we poked less sticks in their hives, we would annoy less hornets.

The Horrors of War

Fri, 09 Jul 2004 08:09:05 +0100

Russian soldier Vasily Mishnin writes to his pregnant wife:

We go to the depot to get our rifles. Good Lord, whats all this? Theyre covered in blood, black clotted lumps of it are hanging off them. . . . It is frightening even to sit or lie down here the rifle is shaking in my hands. My hand comes down on something black: it turns out there are corpses here that havent been cleared away. My hair stands on end. I have to sit down. There is no point in staring into the distance it is pitch dark. All I can feel is fear. I am so frightened of the shells that I want the ground to open up and swallow me. . . . Suddenly a screeching noise pierces the air, I feel a pang in my heart, something whistles past and explodes nearby. My dear Lord, I am so frightened and I hear this buzzing in my ears. I leave my post and climb into my dugout. It is packed, everyone is shaking and asking again and again, "Whats going on? Whats going on?" One explosion follows another, and another. Two lads are running, shouting our for nurses. They are covered in blood. It is running down their cheeks and hands, and something else is dripping from underneath their bandages. Theyre soon dead, shot to pieces. There is screaming, yelling, the earth is shaking from artillery fire and our dugout is rocking from side to side like a boat. . . . Our eyes are full of tears, we wipe them away, but they just keep coming because the shells are full of gas. We are terrified. . . . We will probably never see each other again all it takes is an instant and I will be no more and perhaps no one will be able to gather the scattered pieces of my body for burial. . . . A zeppelin attacked Ostrow in the night and dropped a few bombs, many killed. One woman and her two kids got blown to pieces that blew away in the wind.

To get a war to work to get men to kill other men that have never aggressed against them and that they dont even know the state must do two things: convince men to love the state and to hate the members of other states. The first is always cloaked in patriotism, and leads to an acceptance of interventionism. The second is always cloaked in nationalism, and leads to hatred toward foreigners within ones country.

[The Horrors of War from LewRockwell.com]

Exposing "secret" laws

Wed, 18 Aug 2004 06:55:03 +0100

Gilmore vs Ashcroft [Weblogsky]

Civil liberties were a great heritage for Americans

Thu, 23 Jun 2005 15:14:06 +0100

Is the Sixth Amendment relevant today? You bet it is, especially given the Pentagons use of military tribunals in another country, Cuba, for people accused of terrorism. Ever since their arrest, people accused of terrorism at Guantanamo Bay have been indefinitely detained and denied the right to counsel, due process of law, habeas corpus, trial by jury, and even the right to know exactly what they are being charged with. Most of the proceedings are as secret as they were in the Star Chamber and in Hitlers Peoples Court. Moreover, the federal government is doing everything it can to deny accused terrorist Zacharias Moussaoui the right to cross-examine adverse witnesses and to summon favorable witnesses in his behalf in his federal court prosecution. [Jacob G. Hornberger]

A brief tour through the U.S. sixth amendment, where it comes from, and why.

Today I am a very angry man.

Thu, 28 Jul 2005 19:32:11 +0100

So, I made the mistake of turning on the news today and hearing all about the wonderful things our security forces are doing to make the world a better place. And all the pundits, talking heads, and common folk with their reactions.

So, I'm supposed to get used to armed police on the streets of London for the next 2 decades? I'm supposed to be happy to pay an extra £0.5m, and upwards, per day to pay for this privilege? Oh and more for the mayors armed, plain clothes, policemen on the tube? This is on top of our chunk of the $700 billion the sham liberation of Iraq is costing by the way.

I'd like us to consider an alternative. How about we start by throwing Blair to the International Criminal Court in the Hague and make an apology to the sovereign nation of Iraq for illegally invading their country, killing many thousands of their people, and allowing their national treasures and resources to be looted and destroyed. How about that?

I'd also like to see any proof anyone has that this enhanced police presence makes us one iota safer? I'm not talking about whether the rubes the BBC interviewed today "feel reassured." I mean really, actually, less likely to be killed in a bombing or other attack.

I'm sick of this.

Verry reassuring

Thu, 04 Aug 2005 08:39:13 +0100

Nobody travelling around London at the moment could fail to notice the heavy police presence. Victoria station, Tooting Broadway, even little old Colliers Wood is now a fortress of yellow jackets. Clearly half a million pounds a day well spent.

Hmm... but, wait a minute, the police on Victoria station concourse last night were all huddled together chatting for 15-20 minutes. And the two outside Colliers wood yesterday morning looked pretty bored. And as I passed through Fortress Tooting yesterday evening only one entrance was covered by a policeman (who was on his mobile phone). The other entrance was not covered although there was a policeman watching the traffic. (To be fair the policeman at the Victoria tube entrance I came out of were bright eyed and bushy tails. Just off their tea-break maybe?)

When questioned on the Channel4 news the other day the met police commisioner, Ian Blair, had nothing credible to say about how the police presence would stop suicide bombers other than that they would be "deterred." Who believes this? And, even if it were true, they will just pick other targets that are not so well defended. Have we learned nothing from Israeli occupation of Palestinian land?

But all these bored policemen milling around aren't even pretending to be reassuring so who do I see to get my part of the £0.5m/day back?

Of course I'll still respect you in the morning

Mon, 15 Aug 2005 08:55:05 +0100

We might begin our transformation with the lesson offered by a friend of Kurt Vonnegut as the two returned from Europe following their World War II soldiering. Vonnegut asked this man what he had learned from his wartime experiences, to which his friend replied: "not to believe my government." [From Butler Shafer - The War Against Cindy]

More state snooping

Tue, 16 Aug 2005 22:32:31 +0100

Suw has written an excellent piece on attempts to create a massive European data snooping warehouse. If Charles Clarke & co. can push it through all telecoms companies will be logging all your calls, and ISP's where your packets go and keeping the data for 12-36 months.

This despite it being (a) probably illegal under EU law, (b) unnecessary (the best evidence suggests that the data isn't required for good policing), (c) unworkable (they have no idea how to search the volumes expected), and (d) fabulously expensive (guess who'll be paying)

I've signed the petition and will be addressing questions raised in the piece to my MP and MEP.

I don't see a pattern here, do you?

Tue, 16 Aug 2005 23:21:56 +0100

A couple of months ago the LSE issued a report that rather comprehensively took apart the Home Office proposals on identity cards. Well here's a surprise, Charles Clarke's home office is ignoring most of it and especially all the bits which point out flaws in their arguments or where their proposals made no sense in the first place.

It's about who we are

Fri, 19 Aug 2005 11:51:00 +0100

I read today:

Even in the Senate, three leading Republican Senators John McCain (AZ), John Warner (VA) and Lindsay Graham (SC) are reportedly upsetting the White House with legislation that would expressly prohibit cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment of detainees in US custody. Vice President Cheney has tried to convince the three that the amendment undermines the Presidents ability to fight terrorism. Graham released internal memoranda from DoD lawyers concluding that "extreme interrogation techniques, on their face, amount to violations of domestic criminal law" as well as military law. McCain has released statements of retired officers, including prisoners of war, that claim the techniques put U.S. soldiers at risk. On the Senate floor, when challenged Sen. Jeff Sessions claim that "they are terrorists," McCain responded this "is not about who they are. It's about who we are." [The Incredible Shrinking President]

"It's about who we are." I like that. You hear the phrase the American people bandied around quite a lot in one context or another. So, who are you?

Getting cheaper by the minute

Tue, 23 Aug 2005 15:06:53 +0100

In his short story, Harrison Bergeron, Kurt Vonnegut presented what has to be the ultimate crime in a bureaucratic police-state: "suspicion of intent to conspire." Life is now imitating art, with Britains Tony Blair leading his own war against individual liberty. Blair recently announced his plan to deport any non-citizen who is guilty of "justifying or validating . . . violence," adding that visitors to Britain have a "duty" to "share and support the values that sustain the British way of life." That these "values" consist of accepting governmental policy was expressed by Blair as follows: "We are not having any of this nonsense about [the subway bombings having anything] to do with what the British are doing in Iraq or Afghanistan, or support for Israel, or support for America, or any of the rest of it. It is nonsense and we have to confront it as that." Blairs fascistic rant was even too much for his wife who, in a speech, declared that attacking civil liberties "cheapens our right to call ourselves a civilized nation."[Butler Shafer - To What Is Cindy A Threat?]

Everything is going according to plan

Sat, 10 Sep 2005 21:45:49 +0100

It was a stroke of genius in 2000 to rig the election and put George Bush in the Cheerleader in Chief role. Bush is mean-spirited, vindictive, greedy, incapable of feeling empathy, easily manipulated, desperate for attention even adulation and has no qualms with playing the God card for political gain. Americans are a forgiving people, and most accepted without question this worthless, former booze-and-drug sodden ne'er-do-well's claim that he was born again a man of God. They loved him. All Cheney had to do was select himself as Number Two, slip behind the curtain, and the cabal as they like to call themselves was open for business, and waiting for a new Pearl Harbor.
...
It looks to me like everything is going according to plan. Chaos, like everything else, is just a matter of perspective. Few people really know anything about the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), except it's a name that's thrown around a lot during times of national disaster. Do not think for one minute that Bush "gutted" FEMA by placing it under the control of Homeland Security czar Michael Chertoff. By any other name, FEMA remains this nation's "secret government," with powers to suspend laws, move entire populations, arrest and detain citizens without a warrant, hold citizens without a trial, seize control of all transportation and communication systems and suspend the US Constitution. [The Unconstitutional FEMA]]

Odd, this FEMA thing sounds very powerful, and yet look what it has achieved...

Serve the public good

Sat, 24 Sep 2005 11:45:41 +0100

I was doing a silly political test I came across via Dave Winers blog, I come out Libertarian but if you've read this blog any length of time you'd probably expect that by now. That's not why I'm writing this.

At the end of the questions they ask you for a law you would enact, no matter how stupid or Draconian. I thought about this for a minute and came up with the following:

Every year 2% of the governing class, selected publically and at random, would be either: thrown in jail for a year on trumped up charges, made to teach high-school (in an inner city) for a year, forced to be a janitor in a public hospital for a year, made to serve in the front-line infantry for a year, or made redundant and blacklisted for a year.

Serving one of these would not preclude you from being choosen again in the future although perhaps not in successive years.

If you want to be a public servant then you must be willing to prove it by going there first.

Out of the bonfire of Iraq

Mon, 03 Oct 2005 10:04:43 +0100

Why does Condi Rice think that democracy would wipe away the hatreds that the US and Israel have created in the Middle East? How does she know that Middle Eastern democracy would not uphold terrorism against Israel and the US? In the US democracy is upholding an illegal war based on deceit. In Israel democracy is upholding genocidal practices against the Palestinians. Does Condi Rice really believe that democracy, a mere political form, insures that people and their governments never behave wrongly, immorally, or violently? [Paul Craig Roberts]

This impassioned piece by Paul Craig Roberts expresses the frustration that I feel with British and American states that are, seemingly, in the grip of insanity and taking on the mantle of an unstoppable force.

Out of the bonfire of Iraq new fires will spread and we made it happen.

I despair.

Leviathan's boys in blue

Mon, 03 Oct 2005 16:03:38 +0100

Via The Two Wolves Weblog comes a version, by the chap himself, of one mans story of being arrested as a suspected terrorist for wearing a jacket, carrying a rucksack, and, well, ..., that's about it.

The Police eventually decided to take No Further Action (NFA): a decision not to proceed with a prosecution. In a democratic country such as the UK, one would be forgiven for naively thinking that this is the end of the matter. Under the current laws the Police are not only entitled to keep my fingerprints and DNA samples, but apparently, according to my solicitor, they are also entitled to hold on to what they gathered during their investigation: notepads of the arresting officers, photographs, interviewing tapes and any other documents they collected and entered in the Police National Computer (PNC). (Also, at the time of this writing, I still have no letter stating that I'm effectively off the hook and I still haven't been given any of my possessions back.)

Maybe I'm an extremist but, if true, this seems piss poor to me. This war on terrorists (necessary, we are told, because of Chairman Blair's eternal war to create as many terrorists as possible in the Middle East) seems too important to leave in the hands of the Met who, although they didn't prevent July 7th or the follow-up did manage to shoot an innocent Brazillian 6 times in the head. [Note I'm not suggesting they could have stopped July 7th, merely pointing out the limits of what we should expect and be prepared to pay for in Anti-Terrorism.]

What about reparations for this mans lost time? For the distress caused to him and his girlfriend? What about his possessions that they have stolen from him without just cause? What about the damage they have willfully done to his identity and reputation?

How can the police get away with wrongly turning this guys life up and down and then walk away from the incident with an airy No Fucking Accountability?

We're definitely in Quis custodiet ipsos custodes territory now. Who is making the police accountable for the powers they are wielding against us? Who is holding them responsible for their mistakes? Who is demanding they make reparations for the wrongs they cause? Who is challenging them to do better and do no harm?

Well, me, for one.

People should not be afraid of their governments.

Mon, 03 Oct 2005 22:37:19 +0100

... Governments should be afraid of their people.

It is with great trepidation that I approach the idea of a film version of V for Vendetta which is, for me, a masterpiece by Allan Moore (who also did Watchmen). But, given other posts today, it feels appropriate to be thinking about it now.

I've just watched the trailer and I have to say I'm impressed. The from the people who brought you the Matrix trilogy was a bit worrying but it looked good and suggested they were following the original work quite closely. Hugo Weaving, Natalie Portman, and John Hurt are assets. The visual style looked, from the brief clips, appropriate with a little update for the 20 odd years since the book was writen. I'd really hate for them to mess this up but I guess at this point, I'm looking forward to it. Too bad it can't be released on Nov 5th!

You get the police state you deserve

Fri, 14 Oct 2005 08:53:20 +0100

Paul Craig Roberts writes:

Police states are easier to acquire than Americans appreciate.

Here in Britain I hope we're not as far down the track but I think we kid ourselves if we think there's no risk. Just ask Benyam Mohammed.

Of course we have something to fear

Fri, 21 Oct 2005 09:32:10 +0100

"By definition, we have something to fear from governments. They're run by human beings, with normal tendencies to use and abuse the tools at their disposal." -- Jean-Louis Gassée

Bringing the workings of government out into the open

Wed, 28 Dec 2005 15:49:23 +0000

I've been disturbed by recent reports concerning the Bush administrations use of the tools of military intelligence against U.S. citizens, seemingly in violation of the constitution of that country. I'm not so much disturbed for Americans who seem not to care about the rising threat of a police state in their country as I am for what it says about what actions are permissable for the leaders of a modern, democratic, state in the name of security and how this can be overseen.

I accept that I am in a minority: I am one of those people who are prepared to trade security for liberty. I am also one of those people who would prefer their government to stop interfering in the affairs of others. I am one of those people who believe that a more aggressive persuit of the latter policy would make the former more palatable. That I am in a minority of such believers makes me sad, especially since the majority don't actually seem to enjoy the state of paranoia that they will upon themselves.

I recently wrote to my MP Siobhan McDonagh about the Blair governments involvement in extraordinary renditions. Unlike my previous inquiry about the DVLA selling my details, Siobhan seemed reticient to address the murkier side of her parties activities in government and I received no reply. I am not surprised. Still I am naive enough to believe that it should still be a matter of shame for an MP to put party loyalty ahead of conscience. Shame on you Siobhan.

I believe my government is more than slightly involved in this, despite their denials. For those who think that a British government wouldn't stoop to this I hold up as precedent the actions of a previous government in running the Bad Nenndorf interrogation centre:

Ministers were anxious that nobody should learn that CSDIC was running a number of similar prisons in Germany. There was also what the chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Frank Pakenham, later to become Lord Longford, described as "the fact that we are alleged to have treated internees in a manner reminiscent of the German concentration camps". The army, meanwhile, said it was determined the Soviets should not discover "how we apprehended and treated their agents", not least because some would-be defectors might have second thoughts.
Finally, there was the inevitable fall-out for Attlee's Labour government. As Hector McNeill, foreign minister, pointed out in a memo to Ernest Bevin, the foreign secretary: "I doubt if I can put too strongly the parliamentary consequences of publicity. Whenever we have any allegations to make about the political police methods in Eastern European states it will be enough to call out in the House 'Bad Nenndorf', and no reply is left to us."

Blairs government has allied itself with the Bush administration in so many areas, am I to believe that the use of torture is the exception?

Torture, incarceration without right of trial, a neverending war on terror, increased use of military methods against civilians: this all leads in one direction. I don't like it. But what control do I have? I can vote for another government but I am reminded that I don't remember giving Blair's original government a mandate to invade other countries. It seems that voting for governments is a poor mechanism of control. And what about oversight? If, for the sake of argument, I agreed that a state should have the right to do some of these things, how should they be overseen? The current deny everything approach is unsatisfactory to me.

Is there anywhere a proper debate about what should be permissable for the modern state? How about whether the modern state still has a right to exist?

We're all under arrest

Sat, 31 Dec 2005 11:45:28 +0000

The Blair government is at it again. John Steele of the Telegraph reports on another expansion of police powers:

Police are to be given sweeping powers to arrest people for every offence, including dropping litter, failure to wear a seat belt and other minor misdemeanours.
The measures, which come into force on Jan 1, are the biggest expansion in decades of police powers to deprive people of their liberty.

Apparently the police were looking to the Home Office to bring some order to the list of arrestable offences and the Home Office decided the best way was to just go ahead and make every offence an arrestable offence. Bravo!

Now it will be down to the judgement of individual police officers as to which offences are arrestable. More power to the state. More opportunity for corruption and misrule. Makes you want to spit... wait a minute...

Death Ratchet

Tue, 03 Jan 2006 08:55:51 +0000

Michael S. Rozeff, Louis M. Jacobs Professor of Finance at University at Buffalo, talks about the uncertainty and factors involved in the ever increasing expanse of state power. There is the big ratchet theory:

One explanation (among several) of our Brobdingnagian State is that growth of government sometimes occurs via a ratchet effect. A big event happens, like World War I. The State assumes powers it didn’t have before the war. Afterwards, the status quo ante is never fully restored, even though the emergency, real, contrived, or imagined, is over. The new status quo is one of increased State power, perhaps with some reversion back to the previous situation. This rise and partial reversion is the ratchet effect.

But this does not explain everything and we turn to psychology for an understanding of how dependency upon the state comes into play. Once people grow to depend upon the state they tend to look to it, and not themselves, for answers. How many times are we all guilty of hearing something on the news and saying "the government should do something about this!"?

It appears to me that the powers-that-be work the electorate’s psychology to make this happen. The details vary from case to case. The electorate is primed for acceptance by such elements as fear, desperation, and anxiety. A desperate and fearful people will be willing to adopt desperate solutions. People impatiently demand action and solutions. Sitting idly by while businesses liquidate excess inventories or labor moves to new locations takes time, and this will not do. People are suffering and something must be done! The enemy has struck and we must act!

And there are other effects from behavioural economics that affect how fuzzy personal preferences can be exploited:

Status quo bias is a cluster of decision-making behaviors that have been measured experimentally and observed in practice by researchers in behavioral economics and finance. For example, people randomly given coffee mugs are more reluctant to sell them than people randomly given money are to buy coffee mugs. The ownership of the mug itself changes their preferences in favor of the mug.
All a leader has to do is "endow" citizens with the war, instead of a mug. Once they take "ownership" of it, they will be reluctant to give it up. It’s that easy.

Lastly we have another well-known psychological factor: loss aversion. As a general population we are more risk averse than we think. If we have taken a £200 loss then it may take a £500 gain to put us back on track. We're like bad poker players who can't let go of money already in the pot. Our gains have to exceed our losses by a considerable factor leading to another supporting factor for status quo bias.

Rozeff's view is that the power of the state increases because the present incumbents of the state take opportunistic decisions relative to their powerbase and follow that up with attempts to validate these decisions and make them the norm. It's not a "secret cabal" conspiracy theory but a reflection of how natural human tendencies go awry when given unreasonable power. The more spheres in which a government can extend its influence the more likely people are to look to it for answers and be subject to government propaganda and biases.

I think that this supports my view that we need to find a way forward that allows us to dismantle the government apparatus. Unless we accept that the only way forward is the constant ratcheting up of self-serving government power until it reaches crisis point and revolution.

Read Rozeff's piece and see if you don't agree with me.

There's a 50% handling charge on that item

Mon, 16 Jan 2006 09:17:37 +0000

Another excellent piece by Gary North on Sam Walton and how his heirs are suffering from the routinization of charisma.

The Lords give me pause for thought again

Tue, 17 Jan 2006 09:47:32 +0000

It's a topsy-turvy world alright.

When Labour came to power, oh so long ago now, with a plan to get rid of the undemocratic house of lords my attitude was:

Bring it on. The sooner the better!

So it's confusing to me how glad I am that it didn't happen. This government (which I voted against) seems hell bent on following the U.S. lead of plunging towards a culture of secrecy and unconstrained executive power. The Lords have turned out to be a valuable counterweight for at least some of those abuses.

Yesterday the Lords voted in favour of 3 ammendments to the Home Office ID Card bill. Of particular significance is the ammendment to block the scheme until the full costs are known. Reading about it earlier there was a suggestion that the National Audit Office should evaluate any proposed costings by the home office. I think that is a sound idea. I would rather have an open, scrutinzed, process and risk paying more than take the risk of letting the government continue to operate in secret.

As any reader of this blog cannot but be aware: I am dead against a mandatory ID card as envisaged by the Home Office. The idea of a system to speed up my access to government I am for. Better government record keeping of significant life events (births, deaths, and so on) I am for (they are shockingly bad at this). Voluntary identity cards, that people can choose to carry as a convenience, I am for. But I reject the right of the government to have me tagged and squirrel away every detail they can about me in their snoopers register (aka NIRS).

It seems to me that this government runs with open arms towards a massive, centralized, state bureacracy that interferes with our lives whilst shielded from scrutiny by increasing secrecy about its own actions.

We know where this kind of socialism leads.

(My thanks to Matt Lyon for the excellent rendering of our glorius leader!)

1984 is 21 years behinds schedule

Tue, 17 Jan 2006 12:37:57 +0000

It's typical of a government project to be vastly behind schedule and vastly over budget. So the governments current rampage through what used to be our civil liberties makes for a pretty typical government project.

As William Rees-Mogg writes in yesterdays Times:

The British are certainly less free than we were in 1997 or 2001.

The government is leading a charge against the very notion of privacy. It is using the fear of terrorism - a fear that it has conspired to manufacture - as a means of gaining public support for measures that a civilized society would reject outright.

Britain, if it ever was, is not such a society. Sure, I don't want to go live in Iran but don't tell me that we are on a path to Utopia!

And, worse yet, they're doing all this with money that they loot from our bank accounts through taxation.

The Government used to pretend they would cost £100 each; the London School of Economics estimates that the cost will be £500 a head, or £28 billion in all. I certainly don’t want to be compelled to spend £500 to give the Government a complete picture of my private existence.

I am not afraid of terrorism.

Sure, I don't want to be in a bus or tube train that gets blown up. But we have to ask ourselves, under what circumstances do organised groups of individuals take up arms against society in general?

The answer to our problems is not to screw the citizens further whilst conspiring with a bunch of asshats to rob and kill foreigners. If you look at the history of our actions abroad it seems clear to me that we face problems of our own making.

If you're in a hole. Stop digging!

And, to paraphrase Mike Rogers,

It’s not like the Saddam's troops were getting their rowboats out to invade the United Kingdom

If we hadn't conspired with Saddam for parochial advantage, and then with the first Bush administration to remove Saddam, and then with the Clinton administration to bomb Iraq further into the stone age, but had left him to his own devices it seems likely to me that, in time, his own people would have rejected him. Our best weapon in that cause was our liberal, open, societies and our rapidly improving standard of living.

Both of which this government seems intent on doing its level best to fuck up.

Uncomfortable history

Fri, 20 Jan 2006 17:30:20 +0000

I just read a piece talking about the forgotten legacy of Britains empire:

When an El Nino drought destituted the farmers of the Deccan plateau in 1876 there was a net surplus of rice and wheat in India. But the viceroy, Lord Lytton, insisted that nothing should prevent its export to England. In 1877 and 1878, at height of the famine, grain merchants exported a record 6.4 million hundredweight of wheat. As the peasants began to starve, government officials were ordered "to discourage relief works in every possible way" {2}. The Anti-Charitable Contributions Act of 1877 prohibited "at the pain of imprisonment private relief donations that potentially interfered with the market fixing of grain prices". The only relief permitted in most districts was hard labour, from which anyone in an advanced state of starvation was turned away. Within the labour camps, the workers were given less food than the inmates of Buchenwald. In 1877, monthly mortality in the camps equated to an annual death rate of 94%.

Now the question arises for me, as I imagine it did for the generations of Germans growing up in the shadow of the 1939-1945 conflict, how I should react to this?

Since the contention of the article is that Europeans (and in particular the British) ignore a history of genocide it seems that ignoring it is not an option. At the same time I can't take any responsibility for it. I did not counsel Lord Lytton in 1876.

What I can do is to acknowledge that the British have no moral imperative derived from a glorius history of bringing enlightenment to the world. We ran an empire and it's an ugly business.

These are just two examples of at least twenty such atrocities overseen and organised by the British government or British colonial settlers: they include, for example, the Tasmanian genocide, the use of collective punishment in Malaya, the bombing of villages in Oman, the dirty war in North Yemen, the evacuation of Diego Garcia. Some of them might trigger a vague, brainstem memory in a few thousand readers, but most people would have no idea what I'm talking about. Max Hastings, in the Guardian today, laments our "relative lack of interest in Stalin and Mao's crimes". {8} But at least we are aware that they happened.

That's why I side so vehemently against our involvement with the American efforts to build some kind of empire in the middle east. We have no business there. We're creating an ugly mess that it will take years to clean up after we are finally kicked out.

The problem is that it isn't _us_ that are making the decisions. As Michael S. Rozeff points out:

The higher-ups or rulers who have power produce the big crises and wars. Their subjects, few of whom benefit from them, do not. The masses are not irrelevant, but their impact on major events is secondary. The Iranian people are not making the decisions about nuclear power. They are not issuing threats, and neither are the American and European peoples.

Rulers are men accustomed to gaining and using power. This implies they possess an above average dose of certain characteristics. Benign philosopher-kings don’t become rulers. Those who rule tend to be overly aggressive, rapacious, hard-nosed, opportunistic, pragmatic, cruel, violent, and manipulative. Even if these tendencies are not abundantly present, their power allows freer reign to their worse instincts. Rulers are hawks, not doves. Their number includes more than its share of troublemakers.

Rozeff maintains that those greedy for power live in a rarified atmosphere that sustains and feeds their delusions allowing them to gamble with the lives of the rest of us. That sounds about right to me. What bothers me is the number of people that seem to want to go along with it.

Rozeff suggests it is a failure of culture if the mores of the ruling classes seem into the mind of the people:

If and when the average person begins to go in for contests that are like those the rulers play, it will signal a deterioration in society’s ethical standards. If and when they accept and admire those who win by underhanded tactics, it means that middle-class values are losing ground and the values exhibited by rulers are gaining ground. This is perhaps happening. It has been said that on Survivor "lying, cheating, backstabbing, double-crossing, and betraying happen all the time. Its an accepted part of the game." The question is how accepted these behaviors become among the viewers, or whether they still condemn the villains.

We should look not just to a change of government but to a change of governance for the answer. Successive governments have proved that changing the puppet doesn't fix the problem we have to change the hand inside the puppet too.

I, for one, welcome our new phone-bill paying masters!

Sun, 29 Jan 2006 00:09:50 +0000

Great story in this weeks I, Cringely

"Here's one more tidbit on wire-taps: They get you free phone service! The feds tapped the phone of the Sisters of Mercy in Washington D.C. because of some anti-war stance or something they took in the 1980s. The good sisters noticed some kind of clicking on the phone at times, and finally decided that someone must have tapped into their phone. Their solution: Don't pay the bill so the phone company will have to shut off the phone. The phone never went dead, and they quit sending them bills! The Feds wouldn't let Ma Bell shut them down, and probably began paying the bills. The sisters talked long and free with their friends across the country!"

Almost enough to make you wish your phone was being tapped.

Is it time to can unrepresentative democracy?

Sun, 19 Feb 2006 12:21:34 +0000

Just been reading a story from Ed Fosters Gripe Log about a proposed new act in the US (H.R. 4127, the Data Accountability and Trust Act) that is intended to override state laws on disclosure of privacy violations (e.g. ChoicePoint, CardSystems, and the newly brewing scandal). The key attribute of the US DATA law:

Rather than emulating California's privacy law, the DATA act would preempt SB 1386 and similar privacy laws enacted in other states. It would also essentially leave it up to the company that suffers the data breach to decide if the risk is great enough to warrant disclosure to the public.

Leave it up to the company. Right... I guess it's fitting that, a year ago today, I wrote about the ChoicePoint scandal. How likely is it that we would have heard anything about that if US DATA had been on the books. How can any responsible person think this is a good idea? I don't think they can. I think the only way this could happen is because government is corrupt and politicians collude with business to further their own political and/or financial ambitions.

In the short-term it is cheaper for companies to ~~bribe~~ lobby those few policians who can bend the laws to their advantage than it is to put their houses in order. And the short term is all most CEO's care about these days. Who cares about the long term?

This is yet another inditement of the system of representative democracy. A system whose heyday is long past and, if it ever was representative, is no longer so today. Indeed I find the very idea of representative democracy ridicuolous. How can one person even attempt to represent thousands of others on a range of issues? And, criticially, why should it be necessary?

I can imagine how in days past, where education was rare and communications slow and unreliable, our system of government may have seemed viable. But I wonder whether representative democracy was seen as the best way forward, or whether those conditions simply made it easier for the better educated, richer, men to grab power and create a system of patronage to keep themselves and their friends wealthy and powerful,

Whatever the true origin people need not be uneducated today and communications have reached the point where nobody should lack for information on any subject. What is required today is discernment, judgement, and a willingness to question.

Yet we continue elect representatives to take part in a corrupt system of government, divesting ourselves of our own power and with it, seemingly, our responsibility for what these people do in our name. Afghanistan? Iraq? Iran? We didn't do it, our politicians did. But we conspire to make them what they are.

This is the terrorists message "There are no innocents." We may not have personally gone to Iraq and shot people but we conspired to make it possible. We just don't learn. "Hey, next time let's time let's vote for the guy on the left!"

I don't know what the answer is. I tend towards the idea that our democracy really should be "one man, one vote." That we should represent ourselves and our own interests. A pessimist might wonder about just how horrible such a world could be: mob rule writ large. But could we really live with it?

Exposure to the consequences of such a system would surely teach us sorely needed wisdom, wouldn't it? If we could survive the first years wouldn't we necessarily learn to take responsibility for our decisions? Wouldn't we gradually become a better and more enlightened people? Isn't this the kind of path we must follow if we are to have a future?

Or would you rather continue to be ruled?

All the immorality money can buy

Wed, 19 Apr 2006 11:11:16 +0100

With each day that passes I question further the role of the state in our lives. In my opinion it does more harm than good but the argument I have often stumbled over is the role of welfare payments.

This morning I have read with a sense of glowing happyness an article by Jacob Hornberger (President of the Future of Freedom Foundation) about the separation of charity and state. He compares this to the US constitutions separation of chuch and state.

He also makes some good arguments that state welfare is immoral:

After all, what meaning does charity have when it is engaged in by government? Charity connotes a willing heart of one person that reaches out to help another person. Yet government is based on force, and how can force be reconciled with any meaningful concept of charity?

People who argue that "It's all in a good cause" are, I think, using the end (supporting the poor) to justify the means (forcing me to pay taxes).

Think of it this way: Suppose I hold a gun to someone’s head and force him to take $5,000 out his bank account at an ATM. I then go into the poorest part of Washington, D.C., and I give every cent of what I took from him to poor people. Would anyone say that I had performed a moral or compassionate act?

Isn’t that what the entire concept of the welfare state is based on: a perversion of moral values as well as a denial of the freedom of the individual to decide what to do with his own money? What would be wrong with a system in which people keep their own earnings and decide for themselves which charities, if any, they wish to donate to or which people they wish to help?

And this ultimately comes to the point. In a free society we would keep what we earn and decide where to spend it. If we wanted our society to reflect good values we would voluntarily want to support those charities which we, individually, felt reflected best on our society.

In doing this we would be taking ultimate responsibility for our society. I think this frightens people. They are more comfortable to let the state take their money and do what's right. No matter the evils committed in their name because of it.

Jacob's arguments are better than I have described and I do encourage you to read what he has to say.

The rule is to destroy

Tue, 09 May 2006 15:11:58 +0100

I was reading a peace by Lew Rockwell about the negative effects of the state on economic progress when I came across something very interesting which I have often wondered about:

Even the shape of your office is influenced by intervention. Thirty years ago, offices started using cubicles to house workers. Cubicles are still the largest selling office furniture, despite a huge range of management experts who say that they create a bad form of business environment.

Why do they persist? In 1968, the Treasury Department created new depreciation schedules that subsidized cubicles at the expense of separate offices. Companies can depreciate cubicle walls in 7 years, whereas permanent office structures are given a 39.5-year rate. In other words, the costs of cubicles are more quickly recoverable than offices. This one change alone is what turned our workplaces into pictures out of Brave New World instead of the comfortable and humane places that they should be.

Thanks for the goon squad

Wed, 10 May 2006 08:46:42 +0100

Lew Rockwell considers whether Bush's prime legacy will be the Transportation Security Administration.

The main effect of the TSA? We could talk about the massive increase in theft from baggage.

We could draw attention to the loss of travel freedom, such that federal snoops have become the gatekeepers that allow us to fly from here to there.

But let us discuss something more practical: the incredible waste of time and the unrelenting frustration that flying has become since the TSA took over.

I remember the first time I flew to America under my own steam back in April 2000. I'd hopped a weekend flight to Cleveland to see my girlfriend who was on a training course.

I'm not sure how much this says about me but it was exciting to finally fly on my own like that and I was excited to go because America seemed such a great place (heck even Cleveland!) I can still remember the silly and excited feeling as I arrived and made my way downtown in a real yellow cab.

Now try to imagine how far my thoughts are from excitement as I ponder the prospect of future visits to the US. I think dread might not be too strong a word. Because what the TSA says to me is:

"Hey! Listen up bozo. If we're prepared to treat our own ordinary people like criminals imagine what we're prepared to do to you foreign bastards!"

So thank you America for your goon squad. It does you credit.

How to make a bad situation worse

Wed, 10 May 2006 17:47:35 +0100

William Lind covers a report on the worsening situation in Afghanistan where government (i.e. US, UK, and Afghan army) control is diminishing in the south. The report suggests that this is because of the dual objectives being persued (apparently in no particular order):

Stop the insurgents
Eradicate opium production

For farming families with no other means of survival opium is a life-line and the insurgents play to this by supporting the farmers against the government. The division of military resources between these conflicting goals means that neither policy can be effectively enforced.

It seems to me that the answer is to legalize opium production and consumption (in Afghanistan, the UK, and the US) and treat it like any other product that has potentially negative side-effects (e.g. alcohol, paracetamol, Sky One). Slap a warning on the side and let people get on with their lives and the consequences of their choices.

At a stroke the Afghan government could support the farmers and cut off the support base of the insurgents. The farmers could get a fair price for their produce on the open market. And opium/heroin users can get a better product without being unfairly criminalized for their choices.

But governments don't do this sort of stuff because it means less meddling in other peoples lives not more. The idea that people don't need every aspect of their existence dictated to them by central government seems to be anathema to the raving bureaucrats we are saddled with.

I may have issues with parliament but...

Sat, 13 May 2006 17:13:56 +0100

The Legislative and Regulatory Refom Bill is getting close to parliament. I think everyone who enjoys the way the government acts now will be looking forward to a bill that gives ministers even more arbitrary power to make it up as they go along.

Here is the text of the letter I just sent to the MP for Maidenhead, Theresa May:

Dear Theresa May,

I am writing again with regard to the Legislative and Regulatory Refom Bill which is due before Parliament next week.

Despite the government having made some concessions I am still very concerned that this bill gives the government of the day far too much latitude in it's ability to change the law to suit itself.

Specifically I am concerned that, even with the ammendments, the bill would not, for example, prevent a minister from removing the right to trial by jury because it was 'a burden to the police'. We should not deliberately enact bad laws as we have far too many of them already.

I think this bill strays verges on rendering law-making arbitrary and it devalues parliament. I may have issues with our parliamentary system but if it's a choice between you lot and the whim of government ministers I know which side I stand on.

If the government wants to reduce bureacracy and streamline government it could start by reducing its own size and interfering less.

I hope you will consider my concerns when this bill comes before you.

Yours sincerely,

Visit the Save Parliament site for more information.

Bringing the government to account

Wed, 24 May 2006 09:41:26 +0100

I've just used WriteToThem to send another letter to my MP Theresa May to point out my strong objection to the UK participating in, or assisting with, any US military action against Iraq. I've had two good responses from Ms. May to my recent letters about the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill and I await her response here with interest.

The crux of my argument is that the British government have, against my will, made me responsible for the death of thousands of Iraqs, hundreds of my countrymen, and untold suffering at a cost to myself and other British taxpayers, now and in the future, that I shudder to imagine. I reject absolutely the right of this (or any other) government to compound this misery by taking action against Iran who are a signatory to the nuclear nonproliferation treaty (unlike India, Pakistan, or Israel).

I've also noticed that WriteToThem now allows you to send messages to the Lords as well. In particular you can search, using keywords, for Lords that have spoken on a particular issue. I've identified 2 or 3 that I shall be sending further messages to.

I look at WriteToThem as one of the single most powerful tools the Internet has delivered. It's not accountability as I would have it, but within the confines of our present system of government it's a big step forward. Well done MySociety.

Philanthropy

Mon, 26 Jun 2006 09:56:05 +0100

Don Dodge writes that Warren Buffet is donating a considerable chunk of his $44bn fortune to Bill and Melinda gates foundation.

Warren Buffet, the second richest man in the world, announced he is giving the vast majority of his $44 Billion dollar fortune to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. I said in an earlier post that "Bill Gates legacy will be humanitarian philanthropy". Microsoft was the result of his first 30 years of work. In his remaining years, Gates is just 50, philanthropy will be his main mission.

That's an amazing coupe for Gates and something that, well regardless of your stand on Microsoft, you can just like the man for it. Dodge also makes another interesting point:

Gates takes a business like approach to solving human problems. He is serious about producing real results with minimal overhead costs. Compare this to the way the US government or United Nations, or Red Cross, approach problems. The bureaucracy and overhead is ridiculous. They talk forever and get nothing done.

This is an idea close to my heart. I firmly believe that a pound spent by government is, often, a £0.95 wasted. But why is it only the first and second wealthiest men in the world that get to be philanthropists? What about the rest of us?

I think the problem for us is that we find so much of our wealth swallowed by taxes that are used to fund unpopular wars, ineffective programs, and to support chums of the ruling party. I think a lot of us see the foreign aid budget and, looking at our pocket books, think "I gave." And we did.

When charities come a calling what you choose to give on top of what the government liberates from you might hurt.

As an aside I think it is bluntly wrong of charities to use psychological tactics like gift-giving to pressure people into donating. No matter what your cause, unethical behaviour like manipulating people, cannot, in my book, be right. I also don't appreciate the aggressive doorstep tactics that many charity workers seem to have adopted.

I think the answer is to reduce taxation and allow people to decide how they want to be philanthropists. Government should not be about charity and giving away our money to the problem de jour in order to win favourable headlines for the ruling party is not ethical behaviour.

I'd rather give to the Gates Foundation.

Aid

Mon, 03 Jul 2006 12:39:46 +0100

A week ago, writing about philanthropy, I stated that I was unhappy with the present situation where the government steals money from me (i.e. taxation) and then makes itself look good giving it away to foreign powers as aid.

Today I read a piece by Walter Williams about the aid situation that just reinforces this point for me:

...

Zimbabwe provides an excellent example of why foreign aid, as a way out of poverty, is a fool's errand. "Few countries have failed as spectacularly, or as tragically, as Zimbabwe has over the past half decade. Zimbabwe has transformed from one of Africa's rare success stories into one of its worst economic and humanitarian disasters."

...

Botswana shares a heritage with Zimbabwe, for it, too, was a British colony. What it doesn't share with Zimbabwe is what explains its success: the rule of law, minimal corruption and, most of all, respect for private property rights.

...

No amount of Western foreign aid can bring about the political and socioeconomic climate necessary for economic growth. Instead, foreign aid allows vicious dictators to remain in power. It enables them to buy the allegiance of cronies and the military equipment to oppress their own people, not to mention being able to set up "retirement" accounts in Swiss banks. The best thing Westerners can do for Africa is to keep their money and their economic development "experts."

Allowing government to get into the aid business is tantamount to making it foreign policy and, as such, I'm against it. I'd much rather give the same amount of money, voluntarily, to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and see it do some good.

Somnolence

Thu, 06 Jul 2006 12:32:34 +0100

I thought I had linked to this 2004 piece by Martin Van Creveld (professor of history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem) before, when I first read it, but searching my archives I can find no trace. I'm making up for that by posting about it now as it strikes me, reading it today, that it's even more relevant than it was in 2004.

It describes Moshe Dayan's experiences (as a former Israeli commander, defence minister, and politician) reporting on the Vietnam war (in I think 1965) and contrasts it to the state of Iraq in 2004. In my opinion the two intervening years only make the comparisons more striking.

During the next few days his feeling that the Americans did not really know where they were going was reinforced. Everywhere he went he was received courteously enough. Everywhere he went the people he encountered were committed and extremely hard working. Intensely patriotic, they seemed proud of what they were doing and would not admit any errors. At one point he asked whether they had changed their methods since they first went to Vietnam and was told that they did not have to do so since everything worked much better than expected. Thereupon he noted that the US Military never made any mistakes; however, that comment he kept to himself. He was subjected to a flood of statistics – so and so many enemies killed, so and so many captured – meant to prove that the situation was well under control and that large parts of the territory of South Vietnam, as well as its population, were now safe against terrorist attack. As he noted, however, even a few elementary questions revealed that things were far from simple. Later he was to discover how right he had been in this; in the whole of South Vietnam there was not a single road that was really safe against the Viet Cong. Nor was there anything to prevent the enemy from returning even to those places that had been most thoroughly “cleansed” and “pacified.”

If you replace Vietnam with Iraq and Viet Cong. with insurgents (or freedom fighters -- your choice) this could have been written in the Times today. Later on it says:

Flying to Vietnam by way of Honolulu and Tokyo, Dayan summed up his impressions so far. Almost all of the Americans he had met were pleasant enough. None, however, could tell him how they were going to win the War. Most could not even give a convincing reason why the US had to be in Vietnam in the first place; at least one had said that, had President Johnson been presented with a way to get out, he would have jumped on it and withdrawn his troops. What really infuriated them was any attempt to question their motives. As far as they were concerned their cause was noble and just. The fact that the Communist States did what they could to support the Viet Cong and North Vietnam was bad but understandable. They were, however, puzzled by the attitude of their European allies. Those Europeans supposedly shared America’s liberal-democratic values. Still many of them were strongly critical. At a loss to explain the problem, the Americans attributed it to cowardice, envy, and the resentment that arose from Europe’s own recent failure in waging “Imperialist” war. He thought that, in ignoring the Europeans, the Americans were making a big mistake.

How true. What we read about Iraq today tells us:

Most Americans are pleasnt
They don't know why they are there
They don't how to win
Their cause is "noble and just"
They are infuriated when you question their motives
They are puzzled by liberal, democratic, European states not supporting them
They explain this in terms of cowardice and envy

What is scary for me, as a 30 something, is realising just how long the Vietnam conflict went on. In my ignorance I imagined it was a few years in the late 60's and early 70's. According to Wikipedia however, it was fought between 1959 and 1975.

By the time America pulled out they had suffered over 58,000 dead and nearly 3 times as many wounded. Total deaths approximated 1.4 million soliders from both sides and over a million wounded. I'm not sure how to read the figures for civillian dead and wounded but it seems to be somewhere between 4 and 8 million total.

For the sake of argument lets call it about 8 million total dead and wounded. What did they die for? What was won? Was it a worthwhile sacrifice to win hearts & minds and establish democracy? Well as far as I can tell it wasn't worthwhile in Vietnam and I have no reason to believe it will be in Iraq either.

Back in Paris Niceault had told him the “battle for hearts and minds” would not work, given that that the Vietnamese had their own cultural traditions – as well as “immensely beautiful women” – and that “Californization” was the last thing they wanted.

...

the campaign for hearts and minds did not work. Many of the figures being published about the progress it was making turned out to be bogus, designed to set the minds of the folks at home at rest. In other cases any progress laboriously made over a period of months was undone in a matter of minutes as the Viet Cong attacked, destroying property and killing “collaborators.” Above all, the idea that the Vietnamese people wanted to become Americanized was an illusion. All the vast majority really wanted was to be left alone and get on with their lives.

I certainly hope that the next American administration is prepared to admit that Iraq was a mistake and should never have happened because this will allow them to change course and to leave. With us gone who knows what will happen but it will be in the hands of the Iraqi's. If it goes the worse for us well... that is the price we pay for meddling and, perhaps, learning that price will inform and teach us not to listen to our leaders when they bay for foreign wars.

But of course the next administration will hold to the line democracy at the point of a sword and we'll still be in this mire 10 years from now looking at casualty figures that rival the bloodbath in Vietnam. For those that question this I would remind you that the numbers in Vietnam were achieved even though the North Vietnamese had no effective means to strike at foreign homelands.

But of course I am crazy. I think the answer is not to fight harder and be more vicious but to bow out and leave them alone. I think our leaders (on both sides) should explain themselves before a war crimes tribunal and the evidence.

Neither will happen of course. Let the somnolence continue.

Chilling

Sat, 22 Jul 2006 10:15:57 +0100

I've been following William L. Anderson's reports of the Duke non-rape case and they certainly make for chilling reading if you have any interest in justice being done and being seen to be done:

...

Lest anyone be surprised that [state prosecutor] Nifong will follow this path, keep in mind that if a jury questions whether or not a rape occurred, his case is dead in the water. Therefore, he has no choice but to pursue this path if he hopes to win. Now, should he attempt to invoke rape shield laws in order to bamboozle a jury, one might give him points on audacity – or even dishonesty – but he will forfeit whatever integrity the man might have had. Any prosecutor who attempts to foist what he knows is a lie is someone who deserves whatever consequences befall him.

...

When you grow up on a diet of Hollywood movies and L.A. Law it can come as quite a shock to realise the depths that the U.S. legal system has sunk to:

...What we see here is that the federal system has become a legal system that exists of the prosecutors, by the prosecutors, and for the prosecutors. When Rudy Giuliani, then the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, remarked that the Crime Control Act of 1984 tilted the playing field in favor of prosecutors, he was not exaggerating. A legal system that at its founding was set up as a mechanism to ensure rights of the accused has become a system of guilty pleas and show trials, and is more akin to what Stalin enjoyed in the U.S.S.R. than what George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and the great William Blackstone helped create more than 200 years ago. [cont...]http://www.mises.org/fullstory.aspx?Id=1744()

Strangely I know more about the U.S. legal system than I do the U.K. system. Does anyone know of any libertarian legal bloggers in the UK?

Summoned to Rome

Sat, 22 Jul 2006 11:55:38 +0100

On top of my previous reading I could have done without this piece by Chris Floyd:

Well, that didn't take long. Two weeks ago we wrote here that the "lockstep, lickspittle" U.S. Congress would scurry to give their approval to the dictatorial powers asserted by President George W. Bush after the Supreme Court struck down those claims in the Hamdan case earlier this month. And lo and behold, last week Republican Senator Arlen Specter introduced a bill that would not only confirm Bush's unrestrained, unconstitutional one-man rule – it would augment it, exalting the Dear Leader to even greater authoritarian heights.

A more slavish piece of work – and a more abject surrender of Congressional authority – can scarcely be imagined. And the implications are profound. Besides providing what amount to ex post facto cover for Bush's clearly criminal domestic surveillance programs, the measure is a stinging confirmation that there is no crime the Bushists can commit that the craven rubberstamps in Congress will not countenance. Aggressive war, torture, rendition, indefinite detention, "extrajudicial killing" (i.e., murder), monumental corruption, spying on citizens, megalomaniacal assertions of tyrannical power – it's all good for the corporate bagmen, gormless goobers and extremist cranks now polluting the chambers on Capitol Hill.

But the reverberations go even further. Specter's bill also represents a message from the American Establishment, giving its imprimatur to the codification of presidential dictatorship as the new form of government in the United States, replacing the constitutional republic established in 1789. The bill explicitly embraces the core of Bush's claim to authoritarian rule: that the president cannot be restrained by any law or court ruling in his arbitrary actions on any "matters pertaining" to national security – and of course it is the president who will decide, in secret, what pertains to national security and what does not.

As Glenn Greenwald notes, Specter's obsequious offering "bolsters the President's theories of unlimited executive power beyond Dick Cheney's wildest dreams." And Deadeye Dick has been dreaming of Oval Office tyranny since his days as an errand boy in the pay of Beltway crime boss Richard Nixon. As you recall, Nixon went down for a technicality – covering up a two-bit break-in –rather than for, say, murdering hundreds of thousands of people in the illegal bombing of Cambodia. Yet even that narrow avenue of redress has been closed off now. Obviously, Bush, like Nixon, was never going to be brought to justice for a war crime in which the entire Establishment was deeply complicit; but under the new dispensation, a renegade leader can no longer be removed even for a "lesser" infraction – like eviscerating the liberty of American citizens – because the president has been placed beyond the law. Whatever the Leader does is lawful and right, no matter what the legal statutes say.

You think this is an exaggeration? Not a whit. Bush's own top legal minions have asserted this royal prerogative in sworn testimony before Congress – after the Supreme Court decision in Hamdan. Last week, Deputy Attorney General Steve Bradbury told the Senate Judiciary Committee – chaired by none other than our old friend "Spineless" Specter – that "the president is always right" in his interpretation of judicial rulings. Even when, as in the case under discussion, Bush was publicly lying by stating that the Court's decision had approved the establishment of his concentration camp in Guantanamo, when of course the justices had not even addressed that issue. But who cares? After all, the "president is always right" – even when he lies, even when he breaks the law, even when he orders torture, even when he rapes a nation in an unprovoked war.

Continue reading...

I am a big fan of the 1976 mini-series I, Claudius. If it wavers somewhat from the excellent books by Robert Graves (I, Claudius and Claudius the God) I think that can be forgiven for Graves too has been critcised for playing fast and loose with the evidence in places and, well, it's just so good.

For those unfamiliar with them I can recommend all three. I've read the books twice and have watched the (approximately 10 hour long) mini-series probably yearly since about 1996. I just finished watching it again this week and it's as compelling to watch now as it was that first time.

The cast includes Derek Jacobi, Brian Blessed, George Baker, the excellent Sian Phillips, John Hurt, and Patrick Stewart (with hair no less), Stratford Johns, John Rhys-Davies, Bernard Hepton, Charles Kay, ... the list goes on and on. It's pretty much a who's-who's of British acting talent from the mid seventies. None of them have given better performances and the whole thing is so well put together (despite it's budget) that you always feel like you're right in among the intrigues.

I, Cladius plots the downfall of the Roman Republic ostensibly laid at the door of civil war but largely the result of the scheming machinations of the ruling family. The Senate hands supreme power to Augustus and names him "Emperor". Big mistake. During his reign the mechanism of government is increasingly the use of executive power and patronage. If August was, arguably, a benovelent dictator he nevertheless paved the way for his successors.

By the later part of the reign of Tiberius the Senate was no more than a rubber stamp for the Emperors whims. Roman politics becomes a cesspool and those who oppose the ruling family find themselves poisoned, banished, or executed on trumped up treason charges. The state is preserved, for the most part - the legions see to that - and the people are distracted enough.

Perhaps you can imagine then just how it strikes me to read of the craven way that the U.S. congress is kowtowing to Bush the Younger. Successive presidents have, following the ignoble example of Lincoln, asserted their authority over the constitution claiming that executive authority trumps all. Bush's "the Commander in Chief is above the law" routine is just the latest and most pernicious example. In complementary fashion a parade of ever more spineless congressmen and senators have conspired to make it possible. The Specter act is just the latest and most heinous example.

The secret prisons, the torture, the star chamber trials, the mass wiretapping, and the perversion of the courts. All this could come straight from the pages of Graves description of the later rule of Tiberius through his notorius (and ill-fated) commander of the guards, Alias Sejanus.

Sejanus: Sign it.
Gallus: What is it?
Sejanus: A confession.
Gallus: To what?
Sejanus: Your conspiracy with Drusus to subvert the armies of the Rhine. Sign it.
Gallus: You wrote it, you sign it.

Perhaps this is all fanciful thinking, a storm in a tea cup. Perhaps the heart of the U.S. republic beats as strong as it ever did. Perhaps Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton and the rest wouldn't be up in arms, perhaps...

But the ill-wind blowing from ~~Rome~~Washington seems to me as ominous as it is foul smelling. Scratch the surface and look fingerprints of the Bush family and their friends all over the empire. Look how they thrive and tell me there is no Livia working hard for her Tiberius. Look at the cronies surrounding Bush, the troops stationed in new provinces, the money going to old friends. Look at all this and tell me all's well. Keep on saying it when Jeb or (lord help you all) Jenna get hold of the seal.

Cladius dreamed of restoring the republic by showing Rome what a sewer her government had become. He made the sewer before he died but was cheated of his republic:

The frogpool wanted a king,
Jove sent them Old King Log
I have been as deaf and blind and wooden as a log
Violent disorders call for violent remedies
Yet I am, I must remember, Old King Log
I shall float inertly in the stagnant pool
Let all the poisons lurking in the mud hatch out

It all makes one glad to live in the provinces.

Free Markets

Sat, 22 Jul 2006 13:59:27 +0100

To be absolutely clear about this, for the benefit of those critics and e-mailers who think that when libertarians refer to free markets they mean the existing socialist or mercantilistic political economies, I do not consider any regime, any State, or any economy in the world as now having free markets. Nor do I think that when a politician extols freedom or free markets and then signs a trade agreement or makes a World Bank loan that we are seeing free markets in action. I don’t think States are necessary to define property or enforce contracts or property rights, and I do not identify capitalism with States. For the sake of clarity, I state categorically that the actions of States are and must be in opposition to free markets. It cannot be otherwise since State actions invariably coerce individuals and move them away from their preferred agreements with one another. --- Michael Rozeff

Curiouser and Curiouser! on the-state

Russian state continues to murder it's own

Portland will be the template

War against Peace

The insanity of the state

Open State

The slippery slope

I didn't like that movie either...

And throw him to the floor sir?

The world that PKD made

I wouldn't trust him to tie his own shoelaces

The gulf of Baghdad incident

Not the 9 o'clock whitewash

It is not caving in to the bees to stop poking a stick into their hive.

Boil me slowly

"I don't remember"

Getting golden conduct out of leaden instincts

All's well in Iraq. Nothing to see here folks. Move along now.

The dossier of private information is the badge of the totalitarian state

What kind of crummy Marxism is this?

You think it won't happen to you? It will happen to someone...

Mistaken Identity

Mistaken Identity

A public meeting on the Governments proposed National Identity Card

What government is all about

Lock up your journalists

What else do they got?

A long ramble about law & terrorism

The Horrors of War

Exposing "secret" laws

Civil liberties *were* a great heritage for Americans

Today I am a very angry man.

Verry reassuring

Of course I'll still respect you in the morning

More state snooping

I don't see a pattern here, do you?

It's about who we are

Getting cheaper by the minute

Everything is going according to plan

Serve the public good

Out of the bonfire of Iraq

Leviathan's boys in blue

People should not be afraid of their governments.

You get the police state you deserve

Of course we have something to fear

Bringing the workings of government out into the open

We're all under arrest

Death Ratchet

There's a 50% handling charge on that item

The Lords give me pause for thought again

1984 is 21 years behinds schedule

Uncomfortable history

I, for one, welcome our new phone-bill paying masters!

Is it time to can unrepresentative democracy?

All the immorality money can buy

The rule is to destroy

Thanks for the goon squad

How to make a bad situation worse

I may have issues with parliament but...

Bringing the government to account

Philanthropy

Aid

Somnolence

Chilling

Summoned to Rome

Free Markets

A public meeting on the Governments proposed National Identity Card

Civil liberties were a great heritage for Americans