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]
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I’ve not been writing about XCOR lately as there has not been much I feel at liberty to write about. There has not been a press release from them since July. So… I rang the CEO, an old friend from sci.space days. I caught him in DC where he is no doubt carrying out obeisance and sacrificing a fatted calf or his first born to the God of Paperwork.
Mojave has submitted its application to be a launch site.
XCOR has submitted its launch license paperwork.
I would say both are fairly good news. It certainly makes for convenience if the Mojave Civilian Flight Test Center adds spaceship testing to its’ approvals. Both Scaled Composites and XCOR are based there.
After two years of investigation, Superintendent Ali Dizaei of Britain’s Metropolitan police has been acquitted at the Old Bailey of two minor charges of falsely claiming £200 pounds worth of travel expenses, and lying about where his car was when it was vandalized.
Yes, maybe it is the right thing to investigate alleged bent coppers, up to a reasonably sensible cut-off point, but so far this case has cost the British taxpayer up to £7 million pounds, has involved MI5 style surveillance involving legions of personnel, and has subjected Henley-on-Thames’s very own Mr Dizaei to levels of public humiliation which will almost certainly see him win massive compensation against the Met, should he file a claim against them. It seems reason has long since flown out of the police cell window.
And despite being found innocent, Mr Dizaei faces further disciplinary charges from his bosses, while still remaining suspended on a £52,000-a-year salary.
If I was a betting man I would say he’ll win a full £1 million settlement fee, if he does sue the Metropolitan police for harassment. So I don’t think we taxpayers will see much change out of the thick end of £10 million quid before this outrageous shambles is fully played out. But hell, what price the integrity of Britain’s premier police force?
Who needs the state’s policemen, anyway, to be out on the street apprehending criminals, when they could be up each others’ trouser legs hounding out offensive tattoos, hounding out speeding motorists from behind their desks, or hounding out innocent superintendents falsely accused of expense account fiddling. Money is no object, apparently, except of course when it comes to actually protecting the public against the appalling rising squalor of modern British life.
As I type, the American magician David Blaine is suspended in a perspex box above the River Thames in London in which state he intends to remain for a period of forty-four days with water but no food. For the life of me I cannot see what ‘magic’ is involved in this process but I will concede some moderate appreciation of his will to endure.
Rather less appreciate is the seemingly endless procession of London low-life who have taken it into their heads to try to sabotage him:
Protesters today tried to attack the cage holding illusionist David Blaine next to the Thames.
In a dramatic raid just before 5am a man scaled a scaffold support tower which is connected to Blaine’s perspex cage. Two accomplices had diverted security guards. The protester then tried to cut through the cable supplying water to the illusionist who is in the 10th day of his 44-day endurance challenge.
Excuse me, but protestors? What, precisely, are they supposed to be protesting about? Has David Blaine been oppressing the Palestinians? Did he invade Iraq? Has he contributed to starvation in Africa? Is he lining his pockets from ‘unfair trade’?
I submit that the term ‘anti-social thugs’ is far more accurate and appropriate.
There is an awful lot of this kind of thing appearing in the mainstream British press right now and I cannot help but wonder if it isn’t a faint echo of the ‘root causes’ mentality: the tendency to ameliorate malevolence by ascribing to its perpetrators the implication they are driven by some sort of legitimate grievance. Hence, their actions can be both explained and excused.
Whilst there stands no comparison whatsoever with Mr.Blaine’s bone-headed tormentors, I am quite convinced that if Adolf Hitler and his cronies were on the march today the press in this country would insist on referring to them as ‘German militants’. Likewise, Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge would be described as ‘peace activists’.
The Telegraph reports that the French government has told an airline that it is not to ferry British troops to Basra. The ban is seen as reflecting Paris’s opposition to the occupation of Iraq.
Corsair, which has been chartered numerous times to transport UK forces around the world, pulled out of a contract to fly reinforcements to Basra at the weekend.
Transport ministry officials said yesterday that the move had nothing to do with safety but was a result of the intervention of the foreign ministry. The foreign ministry denied the report, saying there was “no political motive”. But British defence officials appeared to confirm that the ban was political and not technical.
A Corsair spokesman said most of the flights undertaken for the MoD took troops to training exercises. For security and insurance reasons they rarely flew to war zones.
We did fly to Pristina during the Kosovo crisis, but only once it had been cleared for civil aviation.
Basra is already open to civilian aircraft.
For once I have nothing to add to Instapundit’s commentary:
Hmm. Petty? Yes. Ineffectual? Yes. Infuriating and off-putting? Yes. Counterproductive? Yes. It’s got to be a product of the French Foreign Ministry.
Via Instapundit
About a year ago I posted this wondering how much data there was in a truck. Dai Davies, director of Dante, has answered my question (via the BBC)
Before now the highest data transfer speed was achieved by putting the tapes in a van and driving them to where they need to be analysed. Delivery vans can carry lots of tapes at the same time which means that Europe’s roads have a relatively high bandwidth.
You can send a few hundred megabytes per second through DHL
I am still waiting for an answer to how many trucks there are though.
Last Friday, Alice Bachini blogged this:
I am now going to attempt to eat fire while walking barefoot on hot coals over Niagara Falls juggling three lives cats and singing the National Anthem of the United States of America.
It worked. She is now back in blogging business full time, newly energised and revitalised by having a new blog address without_any_underlinings_in_it_as_per_this, which apparently some people couldn’t get. (Although I notice that the archive links in the rest of this posting still have underlinings in them. If the links below still don’t work for you, go to the one in this paragraph to the top of the blog and scroll down.)
There’s also a picture of Alice wearing a bikini and a fur coat, and there is practically no bikini visible at all. → Continue reading: alicebachini.com
Geez, governments can’t do anything right. I mean, your average paint-huffing teenager can grow decent pot, but not the Canadian government. With a multi-million dollar budget!
Some of the first patients to smoke Health Canada’s government-approved marijuana say it’s “disgusting” and want their money back.
The department was compelled to begin direct distribution in July, following an Ontario court order this year that said needy patients should not be forced to get their cannabis on the streets or from authorized growers, who themselves obtain seeds or cuttings illegally.
The marijuana is being grown for Health Canada deep underground in a vacant mine section in Flin Flon, Man., by Prairie Plant Systems on a $5.75-million contract.
Laboratory tests indicate the Health Canada product has only about three per cent THC – not the 10.2 per cent advertised – and contains contaminants such as lead and arsenic, said spokesman Philippe Lucas of Victoria.
“This particular product wouldn’t hold a candle to street level cannabis,” he said in an interview.
Words fail.
What does the government know about you? – that’s the title of a piece that starts with this:
WASHINGTON, DC and DALLAS,TX — (MARKET WIRE) — Carl Caldwell, the president of Right-to-Know, released a statement explaining the depth of information that the government collects about its citizens. Right- to-Know helps its clients uncover what the government knows about them.
Here‘s the rest of it.
Here’s an interesting list, from Saturday’s Telegraph:
These are the agencies able to run surveillance operations or “covert human intelligence sources”, for example agents, informants and undercover officers – people allowed to authorise are in brackets:
It starts with “Any police force (superintendent/inspector if urgent)” and it ends with “Royal Pharmaceutical Society (fitness to practice dir)”, with (I counted) thirty five items in between those two.
Quite a list.
I feel a bit like the photographer sent to take snaps of village wedding for the local newspaper and who came back saying that there wasn’t story, because the bride didn’t show up.
I decided to check out the other BBC website (the tax-funded one) to see what convulsions the anti-euro vote from Sweden had caused.
The result was this rather unbalanced series of postings, supporting the Swedish NO result.
Great story here that the canned voice of Sean Connery, Scotland’s greatest living actor, will be used in the lifts at the new Scottish parliament building in Edinburgh.
Brilliant. This idea could run and run. How about characters – still alive, obviously – who played various Bond villains to lend their voices for lifts in, say, the EU headquarters in Brussels?
“Ladies and gentlemen, velcome to my lair heeere in ze Brussels center of my power. Vee haf been expectink you”.
Privacy International and the Electronic Privacy Information Center released Privacy and Human Rights 2003 on 5 September. The report reviews the state of privacy in 55 countries around the world. Issues covered include data protection, surveillance, anti-terrorism efforts and new technologies. This is what it has to say about the UK:
The privacy picture in the UK is mixed. There is, at some levels, a strong public recognition and defense of privacy. Proposals to establish a national identity card, for example, have routinely failed to achieve broad political support. On the other hand, crime and public order laws passed in recent years have placed substantial limitations on numerous rights, including freedom of assembly, privacy, freedom of movement, the right of silence, and freedom of speech.
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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.
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