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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Christopher Hitchens recently mentioned a small, if telling example, of how Hillary Clinton fibbed about how she got her first name. It is a small detail, not the sort of thing to necessarily cause my blood pressure to rise dangerously, but it is revealing about what sort of character she is. Rather like Tony Blair claiming to have seen Newcastle FC legend Jackie Milburn, when that would have been an impossible feat, given Blair’s age when he made the claim.
These little details, they get noticed.
It was a bit of a shock to read, in my old local newspaper, that F-15 fighter/bomber aircraft used by the US Airforce are suffering quite so much from wear and tear. They are currently based at RAF Lakenheath, west Suffolk.
At one stage, East Anglia, the flat bit of the UK, was rather like a gigantic airfield with more than 100 airfields for British and American fighters, bombers, recon aircraft and transportation. Even after WW2, when the Liberators, Flying Fortresses, Mustangs and Thunderbolts no longer buzzed around, the area played host to the jets of the Cold War era. It was a common experience on my parent’s farm to be walking around and suddenly, at about 100ft above the ground, a pair of Jaguar jets or an American A-10 “tankbuster” would come over (the latter was eerily quiet, and had an enormous 30mm cannon mounted in the nose). Now it is almost all gone. In a silly sort of way I rather miss the din of jet aircraft. But then, we won the Cold War. It is never a mistake to remind ourselves of that fact.
Check out this Bloomberg headline. No doubt one of the editors thought this was nicely “ironic”, etc, and I get their point. Even so, I fail to see why a Vegas stripper or waiter is not as able to judge the wisdom of where to put nuclear waste as say, Hillary Clinton.
So you have been smited, eh?
Yes, yes, we know… the correct term is ‘smote’ or ‘smitten’, not smited, but we say ‘smited’ because it makes us laugh and we are easily amused.
Chances are the reason you are here is when you posted a comment to Samizdata, you saw this appear…
Standby for Smite Control
Oyez, oyez:
Your comment has been held for approval by Samizdata’s editorial pantheon and if you are not some odious spammer, loony toon conspiracy theorist, raving racist buffoon or worthless troll, chances are your remarks will appear in due course.
Puzzled? Confused? Look here and all will be explained
So…
What does this mean? It means your comment has been chosen for moderation by the smitebot. Now smitebot is not a person, he is just a bot. A piece of code.
So please do not take it personally that smitebot has smited you because smitebot has no idea who you are. All it does, in its simple minded but quite effective way, is look at all the comments and try to figure out if they are spam or something else we do not want. And being a bot of little brain, sometimes it makes mistakes.
Is this smiting thing really necessary though?
The answer is yes.
The alternative is wading through three viagra adverts, mobile phone adverts, Russian kiddie porn site links & xxxBigTits site links, for every legitimate comment.. and we really hate spammers.
The fact is we have to put up with a number of false positives or comments will not be viable.
That is the down side of this blog being so popular, alas… Samizdata is a spam magnet in ways sites with lower readership and technorati rankings do not have to worry about. It sucks but there you have it.
97% of the spam gets intercepted by the smitebot and you never even see it, but it is there, trust us on that. Of the 3% that gets through, we delete it manually as quickly as possible and you probably never see it. False positives run maybe 1-5% per day of posted comments (some days are worse than others). It is annoying as hell to get smited, we know, but having smitebot around is unavoidable.
So now you know.
And so to cheer you up after the indignity of getting ‘smited’, we have posted some stupid cat pictures for your edification (we did tell you we are easily amused)…
What all neolibertarian hawks should be driving now
 
Sarah Lawrence’s taste in clothes would be best described as ‘eclectic’
Andrew was astonished to discover in fact he had been bitten by Adriana
Perry de Havilland and his Croatian friend hold a pair of inter-species communications devices
We feel your pain… we really do.
Claire Berlinski and Alex Singleton at
the Second British Blogger Bash
Oscar Pistorius is a South African who has had the lower half of both his legs amputated, and participates in atheletic events with the use of artificial limbs. He has been banned from this year’s Olympic Games because the International Association of Atheletic Federations has rules that his artificial legs give him a ‘significant advantage’ over his able-bodied rivals. He uses carbon fibre blades to race.
A study, carried out by Professor Peter Bruggeman at the German Sport University in Cologne, compared Pistorius with five able-bodied athletes of similar ability.
“Pistorius was able to run with his prosthetic blades at the same speed as the able-bodied sprinters with about 25 percent less energy expenditure,” the report concluded.
This is a small but significant point where an athelete using artificial limbs now has an advantage over normal-bodied atheletes. I doubt that his artificial limbs give him an advantage in day to day life, but in this narrow field, Pistorius does seem to get an edge. I think this is going to be the start of a wider trend.
Ministers are planning to implant “machine-readable” microchips under the skin of thousands of offenders as part of an expansion of the electronic tagging scheme that would create more space in British jails.
Amid concerns about the security of existing tagging systems and prison overcrowding, the Ministry of Justice is investigating the use of satellite and radio-wave technology to monitor criminals.
But, instead of being contained in bracelets worn around the ankle, the tiny chips would be surgically inserted under the skin of offenders in the community, to help enforce home curfews. The radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, as long as two grains of rice, are able to carry scanable personal information about individuals, including their identities, address and offending record.
This is beyond belief, or, at least, it would be if we had not been covering the various madcap schemes coming out of Whitehall the past few years. What we have here is a government that believes that the rights and liberties of its people ought to be ordered to suit the priorities of British police forces.
Now if you take this to be a good idea, you are going to be hard pressed to deny the logical conclusion, that if we were all implanted with RFID tags, it would be much easier to solve and prevent crimes in the first place. This is very probably true, but it also degrades the individual to the point where humans become mere vassals of the almighty British State.
Given the trend of affairs in the UK, that is probably the way things are going to go- give it a decade or two. Early adapters should get themselves arrested and tagged early, to beat the rush.
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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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