We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
|
The FAA released AD 2001 06 22 a few months ago. This AD grounds all B17 Flying Fortresses until inspections of the wing spar have been carried out:
SUMMARY: This amendment adopts a new airworthiness directive (AD), applicable to all Boeing Model B-17E, F, and G airplanes, that requires inspections to detect cracking and corrosion of the wing spar chords, bolts and bolt holes of the spar chords, and wing terminals; and correction of any discrepancy found during these inspections. This amendment is prompted by reports of cracking and corrosion of the wing spar. The actions specified by this AD are intended to prevent reduced structural integrity of the wing of the airplane due to the problems associated with corrosion and cracking of the wing spar.
It is a bit like some strange dream reading about the things Slobodan Milosevic has been saying in the Hague. In this parallel moral universe uniformed murderers are noble victims and the man who heads the government which pays the salaries of the murderers and gives them their orders, is absolved from guilt due to the fact he did not literally do it himself… whereas a couple hundred injured soldiers and civilians dragged from a hospital in Vukovar and then slaughtered by the brave Yugoslav Federal Army (not paramilitary cetniks) like animals at a nearby farm, are somehow just reduced to a shrug and ‘shit happens’. Matt Welch restored some of my faith that all America had not suddenly gone collectively insane by showing that people are not buying into the revisionist lies of Milosevic and his EVIL supporters and apologists.
Also, and far more important than those human compost heaps, my e-mail address is not working properly so Perry, our Chris Patten baiting editor, will be setting me up with a proper samizdata POPmail account sometime today, instead of just a forwarder. Anyone who has sent me e-mail to my private address recently might want to send it again. [Ed: the new e-mail account is now set up as a POP mail account]
Will Vehrs of Blog Watch II cannot be accused of submitting to demands by noisy Balkan women for three-star rating of articles… he gave me four! 
Sgt Stryker reports on an idea batted around ten years ago in the Spring ’91 Air Power Journal: fill obsolete aircraft with explosives and use them as remote controlled flying bombs.
It’s been done. The earliest I can think of off the top of my head was the secret mission in which Joe Kennedy Jr. died in WWII. He volunteered to pilot a B-24 Liberator packed with 20,000 pounds of plastic explosives from takeoff to altitude. He and the co-pilot were then to bail out. The Liberator was then to be flown by remote control from another aircraft… and crashed into its’ target. Unfortuneately the aircraft exploded before Kennedy and his co-pilot bailed out.
This month’s Aeroplane carries a story about “A Cat With Nine Lives” which mentions in passing that a number of Grumman Hellcats were flown into North Korean targets with a less than 50% success rate. Between August 28th and September 2, 1952 six drone Hellcats carrying 1000lb bombs were flown into a power station, a bridge, a railway tunnel and other targets. The Hellcats were controlled by AD-4N Skyraiders of VC-35.
Guess there is nothing new under the sun…
erratum: I realized this morning that I’d said Flypast instead of Aeroplane, as both new issues were sitting on my desk and I confused which one I’d just read which article in… I’ve corrected this above.
Addendum: a reader in Traverse City, Michigan pointed out a secret robot bomber project from WWII that I was completely unaware of. Information can be found here and here.
A few days ago I reviewed John Keyes’ new play and mentioned it would soon be going on the road. I rang him t’other day for details so our London readers can drop in to see this excellent bit of theatre.
John will be performing his two act play at the Wimbledon Studio Theatre from Sunday February 24th to Tuesday February 26th.
Enjoy!
The Blue Button is a highly polemical independent libertarian blog. It is largely limited to American issues but within that purview tends to throw a fairly wide net. The blog has a blunt ‘in your face’ style and it would be fair to say ambiguity and nuance are eschewed for the Monster Truck car crushing approach.
I’ll tell you what really gets on my tits about Tom Tomorrow and the whole Village Voice “we’re not commies, honest” liberal set. They’ve all been doing a bang-up job documenting and bitching about privacy and civil liberty violations but when it’s cast-your-ballot time, where are they? In the booth with the statists.
Quite so. The Blue Button says it the way the author sees it. If you like opinions straight from the shoulder, then this is the blog for you.
Congress is now discussing ethics of business. This is the first time for many congressmen – not business, but ethics.
– Jay Leno
Scott Rubush is far from impressed with all this technology and I, for one, am greatly relieved that, at long last, somebody has had the guts to speak the truth.
“technology does little to change the quality of life…”
Says Scott and…
“Hell, I live in the 21st century in one of the wealthiest cities on earth, and I still had to roll my arse out of bed this morning and go to work—at a computer terminal, no less”
How right he is. I, too, am deeply nostalgic for the days when I could rise from my rat-infested bed of straw in the middle of the night to milk a goat, bury a couple of my children and vainly try to dig a turnip out of the frozen soil with rudimentary hand-tools. Those were the days when we had real quality of life.
After all, what has technology ever done for us, eh?
Well, I suppose there’s the steam engine, the lathe, penicillin, vaccines and manned flight.
But, apart from those things, what has technology ever done for us, eh?
Okay, well, there’s electricity, the internal combustion engine, steel, oil fractionating, synthetic fabrics, rubber galvanisation, intensive farming and antibiotics.
But, all that aside, what has technology ever actually done for us, eh?
And I suppose there’s radio, radar, cine film, pasteurisation, central heating, the lightbulb, plastics, telecommunications, the laser, microwaves, invitro fertilisation, the integrated circuit, computers and, of course, the Internet.
So apart from steam engine, the lathe, penicillin, vaccines, manned flight, electricity, the internal combustion engine, steel, oil fractionating, synthetic fabrics, rubber galvanisation, intensive farming, antibiotics, radio, radar, cine film, pasteurisation, central heating, the lightbulb, plastics, telecommunications, the laser, microwaves, invitro fertilisation, the integrated circuit, computers and, of course, the Internet…WHAT HAS TECHNOLOGY EVER ACTUALLY DONE FOR US, EH??
Despite my best efforts to filter out the Olympics, the bru-haha about the Skating Gold Medal has managed to show up as a blip on my radar screen. If I have got this straight, a Russian pair was awarded the Gold and a Canadian pair the silver only that seems to have outraged the whole world for some reason (there is a war on, you know) so a gaggle of IOC apparatchicks went into a furious round of secret investigations and deals were made in various smoke-free rooms and, voila, now the Canadians have the Gold medal instead. Apparently the judges got it all wrong
Which leads me to a question: how does anybody know?
First of all, skating is not a sport. It is a hobby; a genteel pastime, especially when it’s called ‘Ice Dance’ which is skating for homosexuals
Secondly, how does anybody know who ‘won’? In football, Team A scores more goals then Team B. Simple. Team A has won. In Boxing, Fighter A is parading around the ring holding a belt while Fighter B is being carried out feet first. Fighter A has won. In swimming, Swimmer A makes his way across the pool quicker then Swimmer B. No arguments; Swimmer A has won
Now skating: Couple A does some circles, triple salkos and pirhouettes. Couple B does some circles, triple salkos and pihouettes. And the winner is…??????
Seeing as Will Vehrs of Blog Watch II is moaning about the lack of Valentine party reports, here I go.
It all started off rather badly as I had a huge argument with my ‘significant other’. But that was probably just as well so this way I did not have him moping around later at the party like death’s head at the feast.
I was joint hostess of this party with two excellent lady friends of mine at a pleasingly nefarious and very out-of-the-way venue that for certain reasons will remain nameless. We expected 30-35 people but eventually got more than 80 I would guess, which proved interesting. I have no idea where they all came from and how they found our semi-private party. The guys running the bar (huge kiss to Marko, DJ Klaus and Dobroslav) had to go out twice and restock, the last time the underside of Marko’s old Trabi was scrapping the ground and making sparks because there was so much in the back and on the seats.
The title of the party was ‘Love and Massacres on Valentine’s Day’ and due to the preferences of one of my co-hostesses, the theme was ‘Goths in Love’: so I did radical things with my hair and had a rather fetching ‘tattoo’ painted on for the night.  
The party took place in a large concrete basement that was quite recently used as a bomb shelter, with two dance rooms, a chill room and a very unusual and, um, ‘sociable’ toilet room. Music in one room was things like Prodigy, Alice DJ, Jaxx, Chemical Brothers, Stromkern, Apollo 440 and Orbital and the other room stuck to the goth theme with things like local boys Gone, Laibach, Weeping Willow, Phantasmagoria and Drinking Skull, plus the inevitable Bauhaus, Sisters of Mercy, Siouxsie and the Banshees.
The place had a ventilation system which seemed to be running backwards and so it got hotter and hotter as more and more people arrived to engage in crazed dancing and innovative drinking games. After a while there was an interesting layer of cigarette and who-knows-what smoke sort of hanging just below the ceiling which did look rather cool. A bit later I had a very surreal conversation when four of us got trapped in the toilet room for about half an hour. I got talking with a very beautiful Hungarian boy wearing a bullet earring, who told me he “knew the people whose party this was and they were all smugglers from Russia”. I would have liked to hear more of this fascinating story but then Marko managed to take the big steel door off its hinges with a huge screwdriver and freed us all. All the waiting people who wanted to go pee pee rushed in and threw us out and I never saw the strange Hungarian boy again.
Many interesting things happened later but my memory gets hazy now…at least that is my story and I am sticking to it. It was a terrific party but I am really glad I didn’t have to clean up afterwards. Are you satisfied now Will? I demand *** for this revelation on Blog Watch II!
I must say that the most egregious omission from the Oscar line up for best flick is director Chris Nolan‘s highly unconventional Memento. Unlike the linked review I think it quite possibly does make it to “favorite-of-all-time status” rather than just pretty damn good.
Guy Pearce turns in his best performance yet, sympathetic without being sentimental and Carrie-Ann Moss proves there is more to her than just ‘Trinity’ from The Matrix with her alluring, pitiable and in the end utterly detestable character. Joe Pantoliano is of course as dependable as ever. The structure of this work is pretty much in a class of its own: we see a scene and we think we understand what is going on, but a few minutes later we see the exact same scene but the context has changed, and we realise what we thought had happened before was not the case at all. This happens several times throughout the film, which in effect starts at the end and works not so much backwards as backwards, forwards, backwards again, hop to the middle, jump back again…
This little non-linear gem is certainly in my top 5 movies of all time. Hey Oscar, we wuz robbed!
Scott Rubush write a reasonable piece on his self-named blog called Libertarianism and Marxism. I quite like the way Scott writes but I have to say he drives into several well worn potholes of misunderstanding when he mistakenly sees a confluence of views between Karl Marx and Dinesh D’Souza.
The notion that libertarians always disdain the ‘tried-and-true’ is his first misunderstanding. What libertarianism is based on is the rejection of the conservative and socialist predisposition to deference for deferences sake. Ours is the way that places civil society, and not state, at the centre of social interaction. We reject the nationalisation of private life. Yet civil society is not the product of our intellects but rather complex social evolutionary processes. Libertarians seek the solutions that emphasize free consent, binding contract and free association, all rooted in the ‘tried-and-true’ common law culture of the Anglosphere. It is only the state which can sweep away the ‘tried-and-true’ with the stroke of a pen, not libertarianism. What we reject is ‘traditions’ which have outlived their time, ‘tried-and-no-longer-true’, things like slavery, prohibiting women from owning property and legislated actions against consensual sexual practices like prostitution, homosexuality and other more unusual peccadillos.
The second misunderstanding is what D’Souza and Marx both said in the quoted passages. Whilst they both initially seem to confirm Rubush’s thesis, the last sentences in both of them illuminate why dialectical materialism is not the issue here at all because D’Souza and Marx have in fact drawn the opposite conclusions.
When Marx says in his well know remark “The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself”, he is arguing that the factory system of bourgeois collectivisation of the proletariat due to the advent of technologically derived mass production, makes the merging of society and state inevitable, thereby eliminating the raison d’etre of the bourgeoisie and resulting logically in a dictatorship of the proletariat which imposes social truth on all, leading to socialist ‘New Man’.
However when D’Souza says “So technology helped to free human beings from bondage, and that is a moral gain because it extends a cherished value: freedom”, he saying the exact opposite. His thesis is not that technology will collectivise us but rather that it will make the proletariat into the bourgeoisie… in other words, we are all de-collectivised middle class now. Technology frees us from an existence of collective tribal subsistence, allowing us to develop socially towards the more several existence of an extended de-collectivised civil order.
It is this extended order that allows morality, and not just collectivised force, to govern our actions. Man is still man but the idea that changing his circumstance makes no difference to his moral development is hard to support. Where is the Hottentot Aristotle? Where is the Nung Socrates? Where is the Inuit Aquinas? It is from a level of economic development driven by technology that permits us to spend less time shooting arrows at antelope and more time becoming more than just upright animals-that-survive.
That’s why his piece is fatally flawed. Rubush fails to see that whilst mankind’s nature may be essentially unchanging, his circumstances are not… and that is a non-trivial matter when it comes to allowing people to spend more time in non-utilitarian activities and less time just surviving.
Marx felt technology would turn society into a vast state-society based on ‘scientific socialist’ principles in which truth itself in collectively derived. D’Souza feels technology frees us to think and entertain such concepts as liberty itself.
Dale Amon, from Belfast, reports on the daft new regulation to limit decibels to 83db. Are the EU mad? Who is really going to enforce this? I can imagine the first time some little dweeb from the EU directorate goes into a death metal gig in Sweden. The venue is full of leathered, iron spiked and generally cranky death-metal fans. Is the EU bloke going to ask these nutters to turn down their music, and expect to live? Just look through the pages of Brave Words and Bloody Knuckles or Terrorizer to find examples of death metal types. Never mind the fact that most death metal fans I meet are huge, well built hard men who look like they could be vikings. Is it a co-incidence that extreme/death/doom/speed metal is very popular in Scandinavia and Germany? I don’t think so. Sorry to tell you Dale but punk rockers are wimps compared to these guys.
May I suggest we send Chris Patten to Wacken or maybe the Inferno festival? Someone needs to convince him to announce from the stage at about 10pm what his intentions are. “Excuse me fellow Europeans, I am here to inform you that this venue must turn down the music to an EU-approved 83db. The EU is only concerned for your hearing and well-being.”
Well good thing about this new db rule, it will turn anyone who likes loud and heavy music against the EU in an instant. What I would love to see is an army of leather clad insensed metal-heads decending on Brussels for a huge protest.
Oh yes and Dale, there have been several songs written about the EU. One, whose name I forget, mentions the great line: “another doomed utopian ideal…” You are also mistakened if you think all musicians are socialists. The loud-mouthed ones might be, but there are many a band whose lyrics speak to a libertarian mind-set (especially in the heavy metal/hard rock genres). Of course, I know of major bands who are Tory voting, all of whom think their being ‘outed’ would hurt/kill their careers.
Lagwolf
Rockers Outraged At Regulation (R.O.A.R.) arise against fascist EU state!
|
Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
|
