2003 brings a lit­tle hope. It has just gone mid­night here in the UK and so I will begin by extend­ing my very best wishes… [Samizdata.net]

bq. How­ever, there is some good news to be had. The BBC TV tele­text news ser­vice (no link, sorry) is report­ing the result of a nation­wide sur­vey of par­ents the result of which is that a rel­a­tively whop­ping thirty one per­cent are con­sid­er­ing home-schooling. The rea­son given was the grow­ing dis­il­lu­sion­ment with the cur­rent edu­ca­tion system.

That’s good news for the British peo­ple. I wish that many Amer­i­cans would con­sider home-schooling!

Huge increase in US air­port secu­rity. Sweep­ing new secu­rity mea­sures are com­ing into effect in the United States to pre­vent a repeat of 11 Sep­tem­ber. [BBC News | Front Page | UK Edi­tion]

Unsur­pris­ingly, the sweep­ing new “secu­rity” mea­sures have noth­ing what­so­ever to do with pre­vent­ing hijackings.

Lessig: “Where is the polit­i­cal party that demands respect for prin­ci­ples that I thought were fun­da­men­tal.” [Script­ing News]

It’s right here.

How the Law Was Lost [Con­sti­tu­tion Soci­ety]

A lengthy and depress­ing look at how the rule of law has bro­ken down in the US.

Japan Today Japan News — Per­sonal data on res­i­dents of entire town stolen. FUKUSHIMA — Dig­i­tal tapes record­ing per­sonal infor­ma­tion of all 9,600 res­i­dents in the town of Iwashiro, Fukushima Pre­fec­ture, have been stolen, police said Sat­ur­day. The theft occurred at around 6:20 p.m. Thurs­day after a com­pany employee received the tapes at a local gov­ern­ment build­ing and briefly left a suit­case con­tain­ing them in a locked car while en route to deposit them, the police said, adding the win­dow of the car, owned by a com­puter com­pany in Koriyama in the pre­fec­ture, was bro­ken. Town offi­cials said the stolen tapes were back­ups for the con­tro­ver­sial national res­i­dent reg­istry net­work and con­tained six types of infor­ma­tion used in the reg­istry — a resident’s name, address, date of birth, sex, res­i­dent reg­istry code and the record of changes of the infor­ma­tion. [Pri­vacy Digest]

bq. Many crit­ics of the sys­tem have voiced con­cern over the pos­si­bil­ity of data leaks. The lat­est inci­dent may again stir debate over the issue, ana­lysts said.

“Stir debate?” It seems to me this theft ends the debate, by prov­ing the crit­ics were right in the most defin­i­tive way imaginable.

By The Asso­ci­ated Press via New York Times — free reg­is­tra­tion required Per­sonal Infor­ma­tion Taken From Mil­i­tary. Thieves who broke into a gov­ern­ment contractor’s office snatched com­puter hard dri­ves con­tain­ing Social Secu­rity num­bers, addresses and other records of about 500,000 mem­bers of the mil­i­tary and their fam­i­lies. The com­pany, Phoenix-based Tri­West Health­care Alliance, pro­vides man­aged health care to the mil­i­tary in 16 states, includ­ing Min­nesota. It serves about 1.1 mil­lion active-duty per­son­nel, their depen­dents and retirees. [Pri­vacy Digest]

One of the many royal procla­ma­tions exec­u­tive orders signed by Clin­ton in the last days of his admin­is­tra­tion (and sub­se­quently approved by Bush) ended health­care pri­vacy by requir­ing records to be turned over to the gov­ern­ment on demand. With that in mind, it’s infor­ma­tive to see how the gov­ern­ment takes care of its own employ­ees’ health­care records.

Cloning claim prompts call for ban. The claim by a com­pany to have pro­duced the world’s first cloned baby sparks calls for cloning to be out­lawed in the US. [BBC News | Front Page | UK Edi­tion]

It’s not clear yet if the claims are true, but if so this is very good news. For­tu­nately it’s impos­si­ble for Lud­dites in any one coun­try to out­law sci­ence. The real dan­ger to progress is from Tranzis with their UN and inter­na­tional treaties.

Knit­ting Afghanistan. The United States is–rightfully–required to defend our wag­ing of for­eign wars before world opin­ion on grounds other than that we merely felt like wreak­ing havoc. A human­i­tar­ian urge to make life bet­ter for the cit­i­zens of the nations we assault has been used as a cloak to cover U.S. mil­i­tary escapades in every war since WWII. This sort of inter­na­tional wel­fare state argu­ment has never been entirely con­vinc­ing to minimal-staters to begin with–if a domes­tic wel­fare state is an ille­git­i­mate func­tion of a gov­ern­ment whose pur­pose is to defend its cit­i­zens’ lives, lib­erty, and prop­erty, then why is a world­wide one, with aer­ial bomb­ing no less, any better?

But even at face value, ensur­ing that every­thing will be bet­ter once the U.S. Army has kicked some ass demands a level of under­stand­ing of the nuances and dynam­ics of for­eign nations and cul­tures, and a poten­tially almost eter­nal com­mit­ment (U.S. troops tend to stay put once sent some­where), that requires a lot of heavy thinking–as well as a fair amount of exis­ten­tial despair over the occa­sional immutabil­ity of human per­fidy and mis­ery. Those sali­vat­ing at the thought of bombs over Bagh­dad need to remem­ber that clean­ing up after a fun party like that is long and ardu­ous. The results might not be any­thing we’d have a rea­son to be proud of, either. [Rea­son Mag­a­zine]

Another great day for the oppo­si­tion. It was another great day for the oppo­si­tion as we had a huge  can­dle­light march. It was also a day in which the National Guard used tear gas to dis­perse a peace­ful demon­stra­tion on the Lake Mara­caibo bridge. Once the peo­ple were gassed off the bridge, you should have seen the grotesque images of National Guards in motor­cy­cles throw­ing tear gas can­nis­ters at ladies and older gen­tle­men, as if they were cat­tle. There was also a grenade thrown at the head­quar­ters of the Con­fed­er­a­tion of Cham­bers of Com­merce. Sep­a­rately the crew of some of the tankers were jailed, denied lawyers, food and water.
While the first item may sound pos­i­tive, why do I think the other two are good? Sim­ple, the more the Chavez Gov­ern­ment shows its true mil­taris­tic facist face, the more the world will real­ize what a demo­c­ra­tic cha­rade Chavez is per­form­ing in Venezuela. For three days, the Government’s nego­ti­at­ing team did not show up at the table being medi­ated by the Sec­re­tary Gen­eral of the OAS. Why do you think that is? Also sim­ple, they don’t want to nego­ti­ate. For a month and a half the Gov­ern­ment has said the only option is  that a recall ref­er­en­dum may be held in August. That is not a nego­tia­ton stance, it is what the Con­sti­tu­tion says. The coun­try can’t wait that long, there is no Gov­ern­ment, there is a rebel­lion and there is no jus­tice. As sim­ple as that!

The whole fam­ily includ­ing patri­otic chi­huahua attend can­dle­light march [Miguel Octavio: Venezuela]

Here’s a report direct from Venezuela on the lat­est events. Notice the dif­fer­ence between this and the AP report.

Marx after com­mu­nism. Anti-globalism has been aptly described as a sec­u­lar reli­gion. So is Marx­ism: a creed com­plete with prophet, sacred texts and the promise of a heaven shrouded in mys­tery. Marx was not a sci­en­tist, as he claimed. He founded a faith. The eco­nomic and polit­i­cal sys­tems he inspired are dead or dying. But his reli­gion is a broad church, and lives on. [The Econ­o­mist]

I’ve heard many dif­fer­ent peo­ple (none of them in acad­e­mia) describe Marx­ism as a “death cult.” It seems the author has the same idea.