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 read this item with interest as it shows a major difficulty with the flying laser battlewagon has been solved.
The big laser gunships use powerful chemical lasers in which fairly toxic chemicals are used in massive quantities to fire missile-killing rays thousands of miles through the atmosphere and space. Even a very large aircraft can carry only enough ‘ammunition’ for a handful of shots. For this and other lesser reasons I have not been enthusiastic on the viabiliity of the current developmental generation of laser weapon systems for defense against anything beyond a single missile. I do admit I have always appreciated the major cool of a 747 with a battle laser on board!
Not surprisingly the USAF has seen the same problems I have. The referenced article shows they have worked on and perhaps solved it. If the chemicals are recycled onboard the aircraft, the number of shots becomes very large, limited only by the recycling efficiency and the onboard power available to carry it out.
The chemicals become a sort of ‘capacitor’ or rapid discharge ‘battery’ rather than a consumable ‘bullet’. In operation an airborne laser would fire one or more shots and then over a period of time use lower density power systems to recharge for the next salvo.
Who would you not allow to participate in a parliamentary delegation to Israel? An MEP linked to far right anti-Semitism and holocaust denial. That seems a fairly straightforward rule of thumb. Do not take such figures along as your hosts might get a trifle jumpy.
Welcome to the pomposity of the European Parliament, the post-democrats who represent us. They decided to include Marine Le Pen in their ranks, and the Israelis thereupon refused to meet any of the delegation. The visit was promptly cancelled for “technical reasons“, or, as one official noted, rather pointless.
The cancellation was not met with universal acclaim. Some think that a foreign power should not dictate the membership of a parliamentary delegation:
On the other hand, according to the official, there was concern on the parliament’s side that a national government should not be allowed to dictate the composition of the group.
Others were miffed that they did not go, as they thought had a contribution to make, and the Israelis should have been willing to put the Holocaust behind them:
Speaking before Thursday’s decision was announced, Irish centre-right MEP Simon Coveney, on the delegation list, told EUobserver that he believed the trip should go ahead.
“I don’t think we should be cancelling the event … personally I am going because I am interested [in the issue].”
He added that any members of a parliament delegation have to remember that they are representing the views of the EU assembly and not their own personal view points.
Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West
Tom Holland
First published in the UK by Little Brown 2005 – Abacus paperback 2006
I first encountered Tom Holland by reading his previous non-fiction work, Rubicon, about the rise and fall of the Roman Republic, which I wrote about here enthusiastically in June of this year. About Persian Fire – which is about the titanic struggle between the Greeks and the Persian Empire of Darius and then of his son Xerxes (Thermopylae, Marathon, Salamis etc.) – I am, if possible, even more enthusiastic. The same virtues are present in this book as in Rubicon: narrative grip, convincing analysis, and a story of overwhelming importance to anyone who wants to understand the world he lives in and how it got to be that way. This is a story I desperately wanted to learn about much more thoroughly than my patchy reading in ancient history had previously told me, and Persian Fire made it extremely easy for me to do just that.
A standard rave review meme is that this superb book screwed up the reviewer’s everyday life, sleep patterns, holiday plans, etc., and if my experience is anything to go by Persian Fire triumphantly passes this test. I had all kinds of plans for this autumn, and they were severely deranged, given what a slow reader I am. The reading of other very good books was set aside. Big writing plans were postponed yet again. My living room remains the mess it was four months ago. And then even when I had finished reading Persian Fire I found that I did not then want to do, read or even think about anything much else, because I wanted to make sure that I had done my Samizdata review of it before it began to fade from the memory. So, if you read no further of this, read that this is one splendid book.
What people like Paul Marks or Sean Gabb would make of it, people who know this story inside out already, I do not know. I suspect that they would be impressed if slightly bored, and that they would nitpick details of interpretation but have no big complaints. But I am, I surmise, a more typical sort of educated person than those two luminaries, the sort who knows lots of bits and pieces about stories like this but nothing like as much as I’d like to. And I absolutely loved it. → Continue reading: Ancient Persia versus the Ancient Greeks – Tom Holland ties it all together again
Count this against the serendipitous beauty of found objects, but I just got suckered into opening an email I had not intended to, and found this bit of salient, nonsensical prose heading up a doubtless spurious offer to buy stocks in some ethanol company that I suspect is not incorporated anywhere near the State of Delaware:
Some fire hydrant conquers the ball bearing. When you see a fruit cake related to the deficit, it means that the accurately proverbial fairy takes a coffee break. Now and then, another purple power drill eats a freight train defined by the tornado. For example, a demon defined by a spider indicates that some pig pen sells the recliner to the salad dressing over a rattlesnake. When a cantankerous support group reads a magazine, the federal deficit starts reminiscing about lost glory…. If the minivan about a pine cone usually competes with a mortician over the support group, then a skyscraper hides.
This is as good a bit of expiatory nonsense as any I have ever read. And I have read a lot.
In a recent DOD press release, General Peter Pace is quoted on the North Korean threat:
“What is not knowable is the intent of the leadership in North Korea to use or not use that power at any given time, And applying Western logic to the leadership in Korea is not something that I would personally want to bet my future on.”
Those atheists, people of the book (Christians and Jews), where will they end up? In Surfers Paradise? On the Gold Coast? Where will they end up? In hell and not part-time, for eternity. They are the worst in God’s creation.
– Sheikh Taj Din Al Hilaly, widely noted as Australia’s most senior Muslim cleric and an assumed <sigh> moderate Muslim, unintentionally explains why multiculturalism is quite a bad idea. The Sheikh had, in the same sermon, described unveiled and outgoing (as in leaving the house) women as “uncovered meat”, and that “if she had not left the meat uncovered, the cat wouldn’t have snatched it.”
Rape away, gents.
Corporate executives used to avoid talking about their war experiences. But today’s educated executives thrill and eventually bore you with their high-altitude conquests. A quarter of them seem either to be just back from one of those instant-glacier expeditions or to be deep in the midst of training for one…You get the impression that every spot on earth over 10,000 feet above sea level is packed with magneta-clad millionaires luxuriating in their thin-air hardships.
– David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise, first published in 2000, page 209.
Yesterday I went down to the library in my hometown of Kettering, Northamptonshire.
There was a big display with a lot of ‘politically correct’ language – all about ‘sustainable development’ and other such. But when I worked out what it was all about it turned out to be the council’s plan for the Kettering area.
Exactly how many new houses, business enterprises and jobs there were to be was laid out (a bit like Gosplan from the old Soviet Union). The fact that it is impossible for some ‘plan’ to calculate the ‘correct’ level of all these things (something that Ludwig Von Mises pointed out in 1920) was ignored.
Nor was the possibility that government (in this case local government) should not provide all the roads, drainage, and other such that such developments demand. Of course the only way to judge if someone really thinks that a development is viable is to see whether they are willing to pay for everything (roads, drainage… and the maintenance of such things) themselves – if they are not it is a con.
In short the old unholy alliance between private developers and government (i.e. taxpayer) subsidies…even the Soviets did not have that. All in contradiction to the promises that the town and county councillors got elected on (i.e. that they would oppose such ‘development’.
The level of ‘research’ and ‘knowledge’ that the council has is shown by the picture of the building they choose to illustrate their plans for the centre of Kettering (presently, years after the present administration came to power, the ‘one way’ and road blockage system is still driving customers to other towns and divides the town into two parts, north and south, that are virtually cut off from each other) – the picture was of a building, and not even a very good building, that is miles outside of the centre of Kettering in south Kettering (a few hundred yards from my home).
Almost needless to say the whole display included a lot of words about the ‘environment’ (the environment that the developments would be built on I suppose).
It is a rerun of the trash collection scam. Lots of different coloured waste bins and a collection (of one or more of the coloured bins) only once every two weeks, rather than every week for one bin – all in the name of the “environment” (although all the carefully separated, on the pain of punishment, trash is then mixed together again because the council has no way of disposing of it separately). The whole scam costs a fortune and is a health hazard due to trash rotting for two weeks in bins – or being spread about when they get knocked over.
If attacked on any of the above local councillors will just blame national or European Union regulations and they may well be right, but I suspect that it is not a matter of where the government plan comes from, it is a matter of it being a government plan that is the problem.
Meanwhile the councilors concern themselves with another project. After wasting large amounts of taxpayer’s money on (daft) changes to the Town Hall, they now plan to waste millions on building a new Town Hall, or whatever politically correct name they come up with for it, someone miles out of town…I suppose they want to hide somewhere isolated so that angry people can not find them or the local government officers.
I have not mentioned what political party controls Kettering town council and Northamptonshire county council – but it does not really matter. The ‘Chief Executive’ (what we used to call the Town Clerk) and his deputy chief executives and other senior local government officers control everything – and they do so on the basis of various local and national regulations and policies.
Local councilors cannot even oppose these people as any written or verbal counter attack could be seen as ‘bringing the council into disrepute’ by the Local Government Standards Board – this body has hit councilors in other places for daring to speak against the administrators.
This is what it is like living in a ‘planned society’ like Britain, people who have something to lose do not tend to speak out.
Overconfident?
Governments are happily increasing their power everywhere by stoking fear of terrorists. Why risk undermining that by spilling over into loony implausibility?
Terrorism is the “biggest threat to all European nations,” Home Secretary John Reid has said as he discusses ways to boost security with five EU ministers.
– BBC
Utter tripe. Terrorism does kill, indubitably. That embarrasses governments that pretend to be perfect protectors.
Ignoring government self-image, it might be a serious enough threat to some people in some European states, to be worth some European governments spending a lot of treasure tackling it; and it might even be serious enough to merit changing the law to cope with it. I doubt both those prescriptions, and the latter more than the former, as regular readers will know. But they could conceivably be true.
However, let us review the facts against Mr Reid’s stronger assertion:
- Terrorism is NOT a threat to any European nation. No European nation state, and no identifiable national group in Europe is in danger of loss to terrorism endangering its identity or existence.
- Terrorism is NOT a threat to any Europen state. There are a handful of states in the world whose existence is from time to time endangered by terrorism. None of them is currently in Europe. The only very obvious example is Iraq. Colombia, Nepal, and others have come close recently, but no EU country has been in that position since the Greek civil war.
- To individual people and certain groups more than others, terrorism may present a threat, it is true. But that is not true of all European nations. The majority of EU countries have had no terrorist incidents whatsoever in at least a decade.
- Even in the few countries with significant terrorism in recent years (which really means France, Italy, Spain, Germany and the UK, if you extend ‘recent years’ to cover the last 20 or 30, which is a pretty generous estimate of the contemporary for a political phenomenon), actual casualties have been small. Hospital infection, food poisoning, non-political crime, bad driving… each presents a bigger risk to any of us. Terrorism is plainly not the biggest threat faced by people anywhere in Europe.
Witless hyperbole is the stock-in-trade of dictatorships propagandising their presumed-credulous servitors, in order to buff up their self-image. (Read any government-endorsed press story from an African or Mddle Eastern bullydom.) Dictatorships cannot bear to be embarrassed, and are embarrassed by terrorists, because they can never concede anything is outside their control. But in liberal states that sort of pretension to deity is supposed to be mocked from office. Which is Britain? Or is the question, which is Europe?
The hardest part about ‘libertarian’ is learning how to roll your eyes
– Ze Frank
Transport Blog is up and running again, and I have agreed once again to write bits for it, now and again.
Specialist blogs like Transport Blog often get quite high traffic, provided everyone involved keeps at it. There are a lot of people in the world who are interested in and excited about transport, especially by trains, which just happen to be a particular interest of Transport Blog supremo Patrick Crozier. Almost everyone travels, or has travelled. Bloggers everywhere have the occasional moan about transport, and often also have stories to tell about how transport was good in one way or another, or about how it may soon be very exciting. So, emails to me or to Transport Blog itself (i.e. Patrick) about transport related stuff, either telling the story direct, or linking to where you or someone has already told it, will be most welcome.
Transport Blog will, just as it did first time around, find a quite distinct readership to that which reads things like Samizdata. So it makes sense to have a little competition here, and for me now to promise to repost the best comment(s) on this posting here during the next twenty four hours, over to Transport Blog.
Any good recent transport stories to tell? Terrible delays? Transport policy cock-ups? (Or triumphs?) Weird and wonderful pictures (a particular favourite with me – see below) of bizarre transport contraptions? Very nice transport experiences? Odd moments in transport history? Transport in odd places? It’s a delightfully vast subject.
Picture from here. Hat tip: ASI Blog.
I normally have to get into my office in London’s docklands financial centre of Canary Wharf at some ungodly hour in the morning, so I rarely get the chance to browse the news headlines on television or radio before rushing off for the Tube. But laid low with a nasty headcold this morning, I watched the BBC Breakfast television show for about 30 minutes. This is what I saw:
Item: The local council in Richmond, west London, is proposing to slap heavy parking taxes on people who own cars that are deemed ecologically incorrect (SUVs, etc). The programme interviewed a few bedraggled locals moaning about this, a retired TV personality who said it was a jolly good idea, and left it at that.
Item: A group of MPs want to ban sale of fireworks to ordinary citizens because loud bangs emitted by such things frighten animals and the elderly. We had a brief “debate” in the studio between a puritanical MP and an elderly lady who said what a shame it would be if fireworks were banned. No clear defence was made of the right for law-abiding people to have their fun. The safety-trumps-liberty issue was taken as a given.
Item: The pop star Madonna, who is trying to adopt a baby boy from the African nation of Malawi, has spoken of her anguish about this bureaucracy involved on the Opra Winfrey TV show in the US. This was deemed to be a news item worthy of the BBC’s attention.
Item: recycling of baby’s diapers.
Item: Litigation continues between ITN, the British television network, and the US authorities, over the death of ITN veteran broadcaster Terry Lloyd in Iraq about three years ago.
Item: BBC business journalist discusses how to avoid back injuries in the workplace. It is taken as given that companies must be forced to spend more money to ensure their staff are comfortable.
Now I think a trend is at work here. Many of the “news” items are pretty minor stuff, compared to the ongoing crackup in the Middle East, etc. They are relatively minor stories, what I would call “consumer journalism” stuff that typically used to be confined to daytime television and the dumber ends of the tabloid press. Maybe the producers figure that viewers are unable to digest anything more substantial at 7 in the morning and maybe they are right (but radio news and current affairs seems to have more gravitas, or at least it used to). However, the choice of subjects also reflect the current liberal/left intelligentsia’s obsession with bossing us around in order to protect the environment; they reflect a distinct strain of neo-puritanism (such as Richmond’s persecution of owners of big cars and bashing of fireworks), and an assumption that the child custody arrangements of a person, even a famous one like Madonna, are any of the State’s business.
Bring on Guy Fawke’s Night, is all I can say.
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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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