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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On the face of it, who could object to a company deciding to do more to help the world’s poor? Reuters has a story titled Gates calls for “creative capitalism” (which is a bit like saying ‘Gates calls for agriculture that creates food’).
Gates said the self-interest behind capitalism had driven multiple innovations but to harness it to the benefit of all required the system be refined. Greater focus on recognition for improving the lives of others could provide a spur for companies to focus more on making money out of providing valuable products at affordable prices to the world’s poor. He urged multinationals to pledge the services of their top people to the work.
Ah, I get it. White man speak with forked tongue… “but to harness it to the benefit of all required the system be refined”. Bill Gates is not in fact calling for voluntary anything, he is calling for The System to be ‘refined’, which means he wants to make capitalism less capitalist and more politically directed by our caring masters. Could the fact he hangs out with show biz types and politicos who are all solidly statist give us a clue to decoding his words here?
So is Billy Boy just another dissembling corporate stuffed shirt looking for more ‘feel good’ photo opportunities with such deep thinkers as Bono or that Guy Who Thinks He Invented the Internet?
In 2004 in this space, Gabriel Syme noted some disturbing revelations from an FBI translater, Sibel Edmonds. It turns out that Edmonds had, in fact, plenty more to say, but had kept her own counsel. Until now.
A WHISTLEBLOWER has made a series of extraordinary claims about how corrupt government officials allowed Pakistan and other states to steal nuclear weapons secrets.
Sibel Edmonds, a 37-year-old former Turkish language translator for the FBI, listened into hundreds of sensitive intercepted conversations while based at the agency’s Washington field office.
She approached The Sunday Times last month after reading about an Al-Qaeda terrorist who had revealed his role in training some of the 9/11 hijackers while he was in Turkey.
Edmonds described how foreign intelligence agents had enlisted the support of US officials to acquire a network of moles in sensitive military and nuclear institutions.
Among the hours of covert tape recordings, she says she heard evidence that one well-known senior official in the US State Department was being paid by Turkish agents in Washington who were selling the information on to black market buyers, including Pakistan.
The allegations, to say the least, are explosive. The FBI has denied everything, as you might expect. But a disturbing picture is emerging, and given the fairly dodgy reputation of American government officials to start with, it is not hard to believe that Edmonds, if anything, understates the scale of the dirty dealings going on between the United States and various regimes.
As I mentioned in an earlier article, Virgin Galactic unveiled the design of SpaceShipTwo in New York on Tuesday. This is the first ever commercial tourist spaceship.
There are two ‘stages’ to this vehicle. A very large mothership, White Knight Two, and a not exactly tiny underslung SpaceShipTwo. The design is similar to that of SpaceShipOne and the White Knight One mothership but much larger. Notice Burt has gone to a dual hull ‘catamaran’ like structure so the space going craft is slung between them instead of underneath a center hull.
Another thing which jumps out at me is the use of four Pratt and Whitney PW308A turbofan engines. These are the sort of engines you would find on a large business jet and they need this sort of power to get SS2 up to the 50,000 foot MSL drop altitude.
White Knight Two test flights are expected to start this summer. If they are indeed going to meet that schedule, I would expect a roll out by late May.
Artists rendering of SpaceShipTwo and the Mothership in flight
Photo: Courtesy of Virgin Galactic.
This is no paper spaceship. Both WK2 and SS2 are under construction. In the photo you can see both hulls and the main plane of WK2 are well advanced.
White Knight Two hulls and main plane on the Scaled Composites shop floor.
Photo: Courtesy of Virgin Galactic.
SpaceShipTwo is also well along, as you can see.
SpaceShipTwo under construction
Photo: Courtesy of Virgin Galactic.
SpaceShipTwo is not a tiny cramped little thing either as you can see in this photo with Burt Rutan providing scale. It is definitely more business jet than Mercury capsule.
Burt Rutan sitting on the flight control panel in the nose of the SS2.
Photo: Courtesy of Virgin Galactic.
This is not a one off deal. There will be many of these produced and each will be flown as often as possible. That means they will need an ongoing training capability for pilots. So… they have a very nice looking flight simulator for training.
Test pilot Brian Binnie sitting in the SS2 simulator.
Photo: Courtesy of Virgin Galactic.
For the technically inclined, here is a cutaway drawing. The real cognoscenti will note SS2 is indeed using the original hybrid propulsion system. Hybrids have been around awhile now: Starstruck and AMROC (Jim Bennett’s old companies) pioneered them in the eighties and others have since developed them further.
Cutaway technical details of SS2.
Photo: Courtesy of Virgin Galactic.
Guido Fawkes, the blogger who focuses on political sleaze in Britain, can claim a fair measure of credit for exposing the odious Peter Hain’s financial misdeeds. Guido is on the BBC Newsnight programme. It starts at 10:30 tonight. I hope he handles it a bit better than last time.
In terms of sheer effectiveness, Guido is probably far more deadly than Private Eye is these days. If I were Ian Hislop, the Eye’s editor, I would start to wonder whether it was time to pack it in.
Well, why should the English-speaking world have all the fun when it comes to a banking disaster?
Société Générale, France’s second-biggest bank, has revealed that one of its traders in Paris had committed a 5bn euro (£3.6bn/$7.1bn) fraud.
3.6bn quid. However one looks at it, that is a lot of money. The Telegraph story I linked to has named the guy who is alleged to have perpetrated the fraud; the meltdown easily surpasses the collapse of Barings, the blue-blooded British bank that went down due to massive losses incurred by derivatives dealer Nick Leeson back in the mid-90s.
What early conclusions can one draw? First of all, it is not possible to argue that the more heavily regulated banking systems in continental Europe are inherently superior to those wild, anarchic Anglos. At the very largest banks operating out of Paris, New York or London, it seems that human venality, incompetence and dishonesty is no respecter of cultural differences. What investors need to realise is that banks contain human beings with all the weaknesses, as well as virtues, humans have. Regulatory zeal has not prevented frauds; and yet every time there is a fresh SNAFU, a chorus goes up demanding some new set of regulations – “something must be done”. In the end, the only course is to catch the wrongdoers, lock them up or force them, if possible, to repay the folk they have swindled.
To say that 2008 has started badly in the financial markets is an understatement; with banks like Citi taking huge losses linked to the falls in the US housing sector, this latest, Gallic twist of bad financial news is the last thing that investors needed. Jobs have already been axed in the City; it is likely to get worse before it gets better.
Here is a list of recent monster banking frauds.
I have been reading the Ron Paul Campaign blog on a regular basis and this portion of an interview with Glenn Beck brought a grin to my face:
GLENN: Okay. If you were President of the United States, what would you do?
PAUL: Well, the advice would be return to the market economy. First
we would have to deregulate. We had a crisis a few years ago, at least
a supposed crisis with Enron and they superregulated. So I would
repeal certainly major portions of the Sarbanes-Oxley. So we would
argue for deregulation. Then, of course, there should be major, major
tax reform…
I suspect Editor Perry will also gain a smile from this one. Sarbanes-Oxley has been a disaster to the US economy from the git-go and it is about time a politician got up and admitted it.
Of course the City of London has loved it… all those US IPO’s did not vanish, they just came over here to Merry Olde Englande.
“He must be a credit to his country and his newspaper abroad; he should be either a bachelor or a solidly married man who is happy to have his children brought up abroad; his personality must be such that our Ambassador will be pleased to see him when the occasion demands. He must know something of protocol and yet enjoy having a drink with the meanest spy or the most wastrelly spiv. He must be completely at home in a foreign language and have another one to fall back on. He must be grounded in the history and culture of the territory in which he is serving; he must be intellectually inquisitive and have some knowledge of most sports. He must be able to keep a secret; he must be physically strong and not addicted to drink. He must have pride in his work and in the paper he serves, and finally he must be a good reporter with a wide vocabulary, fast with his typewriter, with a knowledge of shorthand and able to drive a car.”
Ian Fleming, former Reuters and Sunday Times journalist, intelligence officer, and creator of 007. Quote taken from this book, on page 171.
Pretty good guidance. Suffice to say that this applies just as much to women as men, of course (Mr Fleming was not what you would call PC).
Some of you may have heard of the Google X-Prize for the first private lunar mission. There seem to be quite a number of teams lining up for the prize, including one based on the Isle of Wight.
Sir Richard Branson’s US company had a ‘do’ in New York yesterday at which they were to unveil the design of SpaceShipTwo. This is slated to be the first commercial suborbital tourist spaceship. I asked a friend who works for them to get some photos to me but nothing has shown up so I presume I will have to look for the official photos like everyone else. As they are making this public, one would presume they have finalized the propulsion system and will be using the hybrid engine as originally planned.
Mojave Spaceport’s license may still be up in the air due to the fatal industrial accident at Scaled Composites test rig last summer. I have been hearing flip flops on this for the last several months but despite assurances from Patty Grace Smith at the FAA it appears there is something behind the rumor. Last summer we all thought the accident, in which a pressurized tank blew up and killed three engineers, would be a matter for OSHA and Cal-OSHA only. If FAA enforcement on such accidents is indeed forthcoming, I predict the unintended consequence will be all non-flight related spacecraft development operations move off FAA controlled spaceports.
Elon Musk’s company, SpaceX, is due for their third launch attempt some time soon. Not much information is floating around about an exact date. Somewhere between January and April is about the best I can guess. Given the switchover to the much more sophisticated and re-usable regeneratively cooled engine I think they will be moving very deliberately towards the next flight. Pretty much everyone expects them to make orbit this time.
For the last year a venture I am in has been slowly spooling up. I am now under so many Non-Disclosures that I hardly know what I can and cannot talk about in commercial Space so I have been erring on the side of silence as I have been too busy to check.
I have some nice photos from an old Atlas missile complex turned rocket test stand out in the Wyoming outback which I took last summer during a business visit. Someday I will get around to publishing some of them.
The International Space Development Conference is in Washington DC this year and we (at the National Space Society) have another good one lined up. Pretty much anyone who is anyone in the commercial Space industry will be there.
I imagine everyone knows that Messenger did the first flyby of Mercury in 33 years just a few days ago and the photos are still being downloaded to Earth. While not commercial in itself, the imagery will certainly be useful to future mining interests. It’s a great place to get the materials to build the close-in solar power satellites we’ll use to beam energy around the solar system and manufacture anti-matter fuel in the 22nd Century.
Oh, and I believe June this year is the 100th anniversary of the Tunguska asteroid explosion in Siberia. For a while many of us thought we would see Mars get pasted this February as part of the anniversary ‘celebration’ but the orbit of that rock is now known well enough to say it is a definite miss.
It is interesting how companies are so keen to get swept up in whatever profoundly illiberal fashions define the mainstream. Prêt a Manger, a high quality sandwich chain, proudly says they do not use air freighted produce. They are a major purchaser and they are refusing to buy from a great many Third World producers whose products depend on air freight. No doubt this is seen as a positive thing, hence the fact they go out of their way to let you know.
 Prêt founder Julian Metcalf is a fine entrepreneur and his company does make great lunch food. Moreover I approve of them giving their leftover food to homeless shelters, all enlightened stuff. From a business point of view I can see their thinking as a much higher percentage of their clientele are likely to be middle class Guardian readers with an eco-fetish than impoverished Kenyan farmers desperately trying to get the European trading system to let them sell their damn products and really not needing a meme infecting the private sector that makes it even harder for them than it already is.
I have no idea if the directors of Prêt actually believe the eco-bollocks or if it is just a marketing exercise. However as I am not saying Prêt a Manger should not have the right, for whatever reason they wish, to buy from who they wish, it does not make any difference to my argument because either way I would criticise them for it. I eat there in spite of the greener-that-thou crap, not because of it. But the thing that really gets up my nose and motivates me to look elsewhere is… → Continue reading: Prêt a Manger and fighting the Culture War
Today (still Tuesday in Wisconsin), Fred Thompson announced that he has withdrawn his candidacy for president. This is a huge loss to believers in limited government as Fred was the last person standing who represented us and could win in the national election. I believe he was the only hope for a soft landing when the bloated government and all of its myriad schemes inevitably collapse. All of the other candidates are singing some variation of FDR’s song of government interventions and incentives.
There was a popular meme that Fred didn’t want it badly enough. The emphasis should be on ‘badly’. No, he didn’t sit up, offer his paw and roll over on command. He didn’t heel and he didn’t beg. It is true. He didn’t want to be president badly enough to, well … behave badly. Good for him. No honest and sane person would actually want that job. He offered himself as a candidate but could not bring himself to lie about wanting badly to be president. He did not plot and start his campaign years in advance. Our loss.
I hope Fred keeps himself available as an option if this primary season runs all the way to the convention. He is the only candidate that is not seriously flawed to some major subset of traditional Republicans. The only constituency that found him irretrievably flawed was the ‘our guy at any cost including our principles’ constituency and we would be best to abandon them. They already have one party.
Today’s economic carnival ride is just one more warning of the crumbling foundation supporting the superstate. The question is not if the superstate will collapse, but how it will and what extremes it will reach in its attempt to survive. Who will we have leading us through that painful time? We in the state of Wisconsin have just been informed today that because of faltering tax revenues, there will be a budget shortfall. Programs will need to be cut. Imagine what it will be like when the real economic ‘corrections’ hit. Imagine this happening at the national level and to the national programs. And imagine what the proponents of solution by government will be proposing.
Fred, please don’t rest easy until after the convention. This is the first convention in a very long time when the decision might actually be made at the convention. Don’t rule out options. Keep your name on the ballot wherever you can. Please don’t endorse anybody. No true friend would expect you to place their friendship ahead of your personal principles. Especially not if they are also a person who understands principles. I agree that the vice presidency is a bad idea. But please keep yourself available until another candidate is confirmed as the Republicans’ presidential candidate. At that point, you can do no more.
Thank you Fred for running and giving a lot of us even a brief moment of optimism. If you are still on my state’s ballot for our primary, I will cast my vote for you. I don’t want to miss my best chance since Reagan to vote for instead of against someone running for president.
It has been a mad-cap few days; the FTSE 100 index of shares oscillated by 9% today, an incredibly volatile day and although it ended higher after the Fed tried to kick-start the US economy with a sharp rate cut, we are not out of the woods yet. Although Britain may not have some of the problems of the USA, we have the disaster of Northern Rock. It looks as if the British government has decided that it is so desperate to avoid being tarnished as a government that nationalised a failed bank that it will, instead, create an elaborate set of government guarantees to enable a consortium of investors, led by Richard Branson, to run Northern Rock and over a period of time and with luck, repay the loans. It is a no-win situation for the taxpayer, of course, who bears the risk of this venture. It also adds to moral hazard and undermines the necessary fear of going bust that should, in a healthy economy, act to deter unwise lending practices (that is harsh, I know, but consider the long-term problems of not letting this happen).
Anatole Kaletsky is far too much of an economic intervenionist for my liking, but his article today is pretty good. His comments on Brown are damning.
Some time ago I made vaguely praiseworthy comments about Richard Branson, in the context of the airline industry. Well, we are all entitled to revise our opinions; I am not really sure I like what the Bearded One is up to, or his rather undedifying association with a deal involving huge amounts of public funds.
Update: Tim Worstall has some further thoughts.
I am fond of telling people who are asking or reading about my views on the rights of employers, employees, etc., that I think that an employer should be allowed to fire an employee if he has taken a dislike to the colour of her eyes. But I think that, courtesy of the ever alert Dave Barry, I may now have found a more vivid way of making the same point:
In her civil case, which is slated to begin in Los Angeles tomorrow, former employee Mary Nelson charges the eccentric Charney, 39, once had a meeting with her wearing only a fragment of clothing called a “c- – k sock,” invited her to masturbate with him, and then fired her when he learned she planned to meet with a lawyer.
Nelson’s lawyer, Keith Fink, said his first witness would be Charney, who’s turned his company into a multimillion-dollar retail giant with 7,000 employees.
Asked in a deposition whether he’d ever referred to women as “sluts” at work, he said, “In private conversations, where such language was generally welcome.”
Asked whether he considered the word “derogatory,” he said, “There are some of us that love sluts … It could be also be an endearing term.”
Asked whether he’d ever used the c-word for female genitalia at work, he said, “Absolutely.”
He also acknowledged traipsing around his company wearing only his American Apparel-made underwear.
“There is no evidence to say that you can’t walk around in your underwear all day anywhere in the United States of America,” he testified.
“Not only does he admit to virtually all of the outlandish allegations in this case, [but] he’s somewhat proud of how he comports himself in the workplace,” Fink said. “That’s what I find so shocking.”
Yes, how appalling. A man, who clearly likes very much being a man, struts about in his own property, behaving like some ancient God of Fertility. Worse, what with his enterprise being a “multi-million dollar retail giant”, I’m guessing that a great many of his employees actually enjoy all this horsing about, and work harder and more alertly than they would if employed by somebody like lawyer Fink. Working for Charney probably wouldn’t suit me, although you never know, maybe I would enjoy it too.
Mr Charney overstates his case when he says he can wear only his cock sock “anywhere in the United States”. The essence of his defence should be his right to wear what he likes in his property, not any right to upset other property owners with their different and duller ideas about what constitutes suitable apparel. But as for everything else, my verdict would be that Mary Nelson and her lawyer, Fink, should leave Mr Charney alone. If Ms. Nelson has discovered that she does not like working for Mr Charney and his multi-million dollar retail giant, she has a simple alternative. Find somewhere else to work and someone else to work for. Clearly this was the arrangement Mr Charney preferred, once he discovered Ms Nelson’s perverted taste for litigation. Ms Nelson should simply acknowledge the wisdom of Mr Charney’s decision, and look elsewhere for employment.
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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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