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]
|
Famed smoker of Communist cigars and cunning blogger Brian Linse of Ain’t no bad dude fame has finally ‘got with the programme’ and posted some pictures of the delectable British Actress Laura Fraser at the Den of Lions blog.
In case you do not know, Brian Linse moonlights as a film producer when he is not blogging and is currently in the midst of shooting an action thriller in Budapest called Den of Lions, staring Stephen Dorff, Bob Hoskins, Laura Fraser, Ian Hart, Laura Fraser, David O’Hara, Laura Fraser.
Laura Fraser prepares for a scene in the movie Den of Lions Did I mention that Laura Fraser was in the movie?
Check out Brian’s Den of Lions film blog. It is yet another fascinating way in which blogs can be used, providing interesting information and insights as the project develops on-site in Hungary, with updates to follow when the film enters its post-production phase.
There’s an old joke about a camel being a horse designed by a committee. Well, what do you call a Navigational Positioning Satellite designed by a committee? Galileo.
“At a meeting in Brussels on Tuesday, EU ministers reached a deal to provide funding for the launch of Galileo, the multi-billion Euro navigation satellite system intended to rival the US Global Positioning System (GPS), thereby removing the last obstacle in the way of the project.”
Ah yes, the ‘last obstacle’ being a blank cheque for the mind-boggling amount of taxpayers money that they are going to throw at this thing. The report estimates the cost at a laughable 3.6 billion €uros but who are they trying to kid? It’ll cost more than that to supply the EU ministers with a set of custom-made luxury ‘space slippers’ for when they attend the ceremonial launch.
Or, rather, when they don’t because if this thing ever actually makes it into space then my name is Buzz Lightyear. Just like that other grand EU project the Eurofighter the damned thing will be lucky if it ever emerges from the assembly line. The Eurofighter has had public money hosed it at for lord knows how long, it was obsolete 2 years ago and it hasn’t even been built yet!
The exhausted European taxpayer would have had to have forked out far less money if the EU had simply ordered a squadron of F-16s (as HM Government was advised to do by the Ministry of Defence). But, oh no, we don’t want that. We have to have a ‘European’ combat aircraft to express our distinct ‘European’ identity. Looks like they got it.
So, cue another round of horse-trading, bickering and monumental waste as each part of the Galileo project is apportioned out according to who makes the most noise. The French will build the electrics, the Italians will build the housing, the Belgians will make the navigation system, the Germans will make the rocket boosters, the Spanish will make the launch platform, the Austrians will make the sandwiches and Sweden will provide the environmental protestors.
And you can guess, I mean you just know that none of the bits will fit together, the rest of the bits won’t work and all the bits will be behind schedule, ludicrously over-budget and held up by strike action. And, naturally, nobody will wish to complain because to do will cause a diplomatic incident and the launch site will be located in the country that agrees not to vote against French agricultural subsidies (and guaranteed to be the one furthest away from the Equator – Finland probably).
The Galileo project will, again, graphically illustrate everything that is wrong with the EU. The Soviets managed to get into space because they had a command economy where a Kommisar for Space simply ordered that a satellite be built and it was duly built. Mind you, they had to work with a wooden crate, a leaky old battery and a tube of glue but, by golly, they did it. But there will no such bullish positivity for Galileo, proving that the EU is riven with all the drawbacks of a totalitarian state and none of the advantages.
This whole debacle could have been avoided if they’d simply taken up the American offer of buying bandwidth on America’s own GPS system. It would certainly have saved a mint. But, no, the EU has to have its own satellite system so it can cock a snoot at those imperialist ‘Yanquees’ and get on with doing lots of, er, ‘European’ things in space. Besides, the European taxpayers have got far more money than they need.
There is some small chink of light at the end of this particular worm-hole, though. The US government has expressed concern that should Galileo become operational it could be used by terrorist cells to plan attacks on the US. Now, personally, I think that the Americans, the Russians, the Indians, the Israelis, the Australians, the Japanese and just about everybody else will have functioning colonies on Mars before that happens, but, in the event that it does, the US just might find itself in a position where they have to shoot the bloody thing out of the sky (chortle, snigger, stuff handkerchief in mouth). What a tragedy!!
As I once mentioned before in an earlier blog article, I am not one of those people who thinks the term ‘modern art’ is an oxymoron. That said, I am somewhat in sympathy with the Stuckists and regard much (or even most) ‘installation art’ as not so much bad art as not art at all.
This picture of the late Queen Mother, whilst clearly a piece of classical portraiture, is also quite modern in its lightness and style. It does not attempt either soulless photographic hyper-realism or remote abstraction but instead captures the rather charming essence of the subject’s mixture of formality and accessibility.
It is a reminder that we do not have to look very far back to avoid “British art disappearing up its own arse” as Ivan Massow put it. I do not think art should just be formal portraits but I do think it must have meaning that rational observers can actually divine.
Gosh, what a lot of e-mails I had waiting for me asking why I have not posted for a while. Unfortunately I have been too involved with unexpected business travel and family matters to be able to blog. To make matters worse my portable is sick and so I can only post from my office, which is a bit difficult.
I hope to do a few postings this week if my crazy schedule permits!
In the small hours of Monday morning I went to visit A Coyote at the Dog Show, on account of it being the first on the blog list on the Samizdata sidebar links. The Coyote man quoted (on Thursday March 28) an interesting opinion from Bill Quick:
Tens of thousands of folks are getting a charge out of creating and maintaining blogs, with absolutely no financial rewards – except for a handful of bloggers so tiny their numbers are statistically meaningless noise. The charge is enough for now, but it won’t last, and the blogosphere, currently in full expansion, will shrink like a popped balloon in another year or so, as hundreds of thousands of blogs go dark and dead.
The problem is simple: it requires too much work and talent to maintain a good blog, work and talent that brings in nothing tangible for the creator.
A similar thought had been occurring to me. Patrick Crozier tells me that keeping UK Transport in full flow is already an effort. Natalie Solent is off at the seaside. Will they go dark and dead? I do hope not.
I don’t think Samizdata will expire soon. Perry seems like a stayer to me, and is not arrogant enough to assume that he can keep Samizdata going indefinitely all by himself. Maybe he could, but why take the chance? There’s a team of us, and Perry is always on the lookout for more. (Libertarian, supermodel, good sense of humour, advanced philosophy degree, is the kind of CV he seems to like best, if you’re thinking of applying.)
Plus: We’re ideologically motivated. We have something big to say, and to keep on saying. We don’t get money, but we do get prestige within the libertarian movement. The Libertarian Alliance has chuntered along for two decades fuelled by little else, inspired by the mere dream of readership numbers per year of the sort that Samizdata now gets in a week. Samizdatans will come and go, but Samizdata itself could well continue into the 2020s.
Nor will Samizdata be the only survivor. Blogging won’t go away, any more than insects will merely because so many of them die per hour. Bill Quick thinking that it will sounds to me like the wishful thinking of a professional writer (which the talented Bill Quick is), wanting to believe that these damned amateurs will vanish and restore the status quo ante. Many will, true. Blogging, like the internet as a whole, will have downs as well as ups, but enough blogs will stick around to prove Bill wrong. Even if blogging is for many only a brief shining moment, millions will want that moment, and then millions more, until some even better way of writing your mind comes along.
And some of the blogs that do stick around will become much bigger than any blog is now.
With so much in the world to write about, comment upon, illuminate, satirise and analyse, I can no longer remain oblivious to the elephant that has rudely bashed down my door and lumbered into my room.
He’s been loitering outside for a good while now, occasionally catching my eye with a baleful and accusatory glance. Thus far, I have succeeded in shutting him out but I still catch a glimpse of him through the crack in my curtains; I lie in bed at night and hear his tail swishing to-and-fro and feel the bump as his ample haunches scrape against my walls.
My efforts at exclusion have availed me nought for he has abandoned his patient vigil and simply barged his way in. He is standing next to me now, snorting and bellowing and commanding my every regard.
I write this not because I want to but because I feel I have to.
We have all watched while events in the Middle East have rapidly escalated to the point where Israel has, now, formally declared itself to be at war. It is a conflict that we all regard with a deep sense of foreboding because we all instinctively realise the implications not just for the parties concerned but beyond. Having read the posting from Perry de Havilland, it is with a heavy heart that I concur with both his analysis and his prognosis.
But it does not end there and it would be bad enough even if it did. As evidence mounts that both Syria and Iraq are preparing to enjoin a wider war and given the intention of both the USA and the UK to go after Saddam and America’s broader war against Al-Qaeda, the mind begins to boggle at just how bad all this could get. Will Islamic radicals take this war to the USA mainland again? And what happens if they do?
In a way that if the most frightening element of this mess; the fact that Arab radicals really seem to think they can push the Israelis into the sea and bring the West to its knees. Not wishing to be pejorative, but they are, quite simply, deranged. That’s what makes this so different from the Cold War. The Russians had chained themselves to a warped and bankrupt philosophy but they could always be relied upon to act in their own best interests.
Not so here, sadly. Too many Arabic radicals believe their own rhetoric and are suicidal enough to act upon it. They simply do not seem to appreciate that whatever force the Israelis can unleash it is not but a gnat’s bite compared to that which can be visited upon them by Uncle Sam.
I can see the confluence of forces beginning to take shape and time-honoured dark clouds brooding on the horizon. Maybe this is my sordid and pessimistic imagination at work but there are too many red lights flashing to dismiss them all as herrings.
Did it feel like this in 1913? Could anyone see then where that Great Power rivalry was going to lead? Did anyone imagine the scale of carnage that lay ahead? If they did, would history have been any different? Or is there something deep within the epistemology of our species that impels us inexorably towards these periodic bloodlettings, regardless of the steps we take to avoid them? Is that really what all our searching and truth-seeking is all about? A desire to know the truth about ourselves when the real truth hides in plain sight all around us. Libertarianism, Conservatism, Socialism, Marxism and all other ‘isms’ seem nothing more than ephemeral and foppish casuistry in times like these; parlour games for the effete, the safe and the well-fed.
The kind of parlour games they probably played with each other in that last, dappled Edwardian summer before Europe became a charnel-house.
I don’t know if Europe, or anywhere else, will become a charnel-house again. I certainly hope not. But if things go as badly as they could go, then a lot of consequences will follow and expect none of them to be very agreeable. Synagogues are already ablaze in France.
None of us may be touched, but all of us will be tested.
The elephant is still here. I suppose I will have to learn to live round him somehow. He tells me that he once appeared in the background in Out of Africa and he keeps quoting a line from the film; a resignation used by the African farm workers when they were facing a catastrophe or force majeure that they could neither avoid nor prevent.
“Mem’sahib” they would say ”God is coming”
It is said that the civilized man seeks out good and intelligent company, so that by learned discourse, he may rise above the savage, and be closer to God. Personally however, I like to start the day with a total dickhead to remind me that I’m best.
– Edmund Blackadder (Rowan Atkinson)
Allen Thorpe also sees demonstrations as a largely pointless exercise
Demonstrations have lost their point. It used to be that oppressed people, like American blacks under Jim Crow, could demonstrate and draw national attention to the injustices of the way they were treated. Then it meant something.
Today it’s just a substitute for thinking and reasoned argument. Causes are inflated to the point where fat people demonstrate because they’re not considered beautiful. Who cares? And if we do care, what can anybody do about the situation?
Demonstrating, picketing and marching is now so common that the media hardly notices anymore, so the demonstrators try to get attention through numbers (The Million [Insert name here] March), violence (anti-globalist demonstrators), or commit terrorist acts such as those of the ELF (Environmental Liberation Front) in the U.S.
The more it goes on, however, the more pointless it all seems. The Palestinians could probably win more sympathy by non-violent means than by what they’re doing now. The problem is that they want more than simply a state of their own. They want to destroy Israel, to accomplish what all the wars with Israel were unable to accomplish. By teaching their young people that martyrdom is the gate to a better life and earns a perpetual income for their families, they have made themselves appear irrational and abominable to the rest of us. It is difficult to see where this will end. How can Arafat stop this? And if he can’t, why should anyone negotiate with him or anyone else from the Palestinian side?
What’s next, everyone in Gaza and the West Bank to go on a hunger strike? How about mass suicide? Everybody will be sorry then, right?
In essence demonstrations have become tantrums, not the simple, civil refusals that Ghandi and King used. These worked because they brought attention both to the powerlessness of the demonstrators and the injustice of their treatment by those in power. Once they start using violence, the demonstrators lose that appeal and become mere lawbreakers.
Allen S. Thorpe
|
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.
|
