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.
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It is now officially official as the awaited press release has been officially released:
As mentioned in my update last month, we do expect to conduct a launch countdown in late September as scheduled.
Having said that, it is still possible that we encounter an issue that needs to be investigated, which would delay launch until the next available window in late October. If preparations go smoothly, we will conduct a static fire on Saturday and launch sometime between Tuesday and Thursday (California time).
The SpaceX team worked hard to make this launch window, but we also took the time to review data from Flight 3 in detail. In addition to us reviewing the data, we had several outside experts check the data and conclusions. No flight critical problems were found apart from the thrust transient issue.
Flight 5 production is well underway with an expected January completion date, Flight 6 parts are on order and Flight 7 production will begin early next year. We are now in steady state production of Falcon 1 at a rate of one vehicle every four months, which we will probably step up to one vehicle every two to three months in 2010.
– Elon Musk
I will keep you informed as news comes in and if at all possible will live blog the launch from here on the other side of the planet from Kwaj as I have on each of the previous Falcon test flights.
Monday, Sep 22: The engine test was accomplished successfully over the weekend so we are on track to see a flight 4 launch attempt later this week
Tuesday, Sep 23: The flight is scheduled for today if you are in the US, or ‘tomorrow’ if you are where I sit. Window opens around 2300 UTC and runs until 0400 UTC. That will be afternoon or evening for US readers.
Tuesday, Sep 23: They are swapping out a component in the second stage and the launch is now note expected until Sunday, Sep 28 at the earliest. Current range usage window lasts until next Wed, October 1.
The Spectator has a strong article on just how bad the public finances are in the UK as a result of the private finance initiative (PFI) being used to move lots of public spending items, including traditional “core” activities, “off the balance sheet”. As I have said before, the very notion of “off-balance sheet financing” needs to be smashed into atoms. If someone has a debt to someone else, it has to be recorded somewhere; it does not just vanish into thin air. Gordon Brown was an enthusiastic user of PFI to reduce the recorded total of debt to give the impression that our finances were in better shape than is really the case.
There is a double-standard here. At the moment, there is a chorus of abuse being hurled at investment firms for the problems connected to the credit crunch and some of that criticism may even hold some water. One does not have to be an opponent of the market to be critical of some of the daft investments that have been made. The sheer, brain-frying complexity of financial derivative products appears to have wrong-footed even some of the sharper banks. But politicians have been engaging in accounting practices, such as those involving PFI, which would have corporate executives brought before a court of law or sacked on the spot. The very promises that politicians make over spending commitments such as pensions, for instance, are comparable to hawkers of Ponzi schemes.
There is a real difference between the brutal changes going on in the City, Wall Street and elsewhere, and the unreality of the political circus. With business tycoons, most, if not all of them get the boot if things go wrong, although I doubt many of them will be crying too much, judging by their high salaries. It is a pity that the process of punishing crooked political actions is not as swift.
Meanwhile, the same folk who brought us the likes of PFI will no doubt argue for yet more regulations.
Once the financial markets have hopefully calmed down, this development is likely to gain much greater significance:
Five sharia courts have been set up in London, Birmingham, Bradford and Manchester and Nuneaton, Warwickshire. The government has quietly sanctioned that their rulings are enforceable with the full power of the judicial system, through the county courts or High Court. Previously, the rulings were not binding and depended on voluntary compliance among Muslims.
What has been predicted has come to pass. As I discussed on a previous post while attacking the Archbishop of Canterbury and a senior UK judge on the matter, this move undermines the core principle of a free society, namely, that all are equal under the rule of law, and that a polycentric legl code, while fine in theory, tends to be unacceptable in practice if some people, such as Muslim women, are at risk of being coerced by their families into submitting to such courts. Given that in matrimonial disputes, men are favoured over women under Muslim law, this development is bad for women. Now, where is the chorus of complaint from feminists?
The article continues:
Muslim tribunal courts started passing sharia judgments in August 2007. They have dealt with more than 100 cases that range from Muslim divorce and inheritance to nuisance neighbours. It has also emerged that tribunal courts have settled six cases of domestic violence between married couples, working in tandem with the police investigations.
In tandem?
The rulings of arbitration tribunals are binding in law, provided that both parties in the dispute agree to give it the power to rule on their case.
That has to be the crucial point, but the worry must be that women, for example, will face considerable pressure in marital disputes to submit – that is what Islam means – to sharia law. The whole point about everyone being under the same legal code is that pressure is at least lessened somewhat.
This comment was telling:
In a recent inheritance dispute handled by the court in Nuneaton, the estate of a Midlands man was divided between three daughters and two sons. The judges on the panel gave the sons twice as much as the daughters, in accordance with sharia. Had the family gone to a normal British court, the daughters would have got equal amounts.
Well, exactly. Now that the Tories are miles ahead in the opinion polls, it would not be too much to ask for a future Tory administration to shut these courts down if it can be shown that parties to a dispute had been under any duress to accept them in the first place. Also, where children are involved and therefore the child is clearly not able to consent, such rulings should be declared inadmissable, period. The same point would apply to any other network of courts or arbitrators from any other religion, for that matter. For example, as far as I understand it, Jewish courts do not have binding powers if they are at odds with the existing UK ones.
At the very least, this development plays straight into the hands of bigots of all stripes, including the Far Right, of course. Equality before the law may sometimes be an empty phrase, but it touches on a vital principle in jurispudence in a free society.
Peter Tatchell, selling Green policy under the guise of giving advice to the PM, has a number of suggestions. One of them fully restores the Green Party’s reputation for plain weirdness:
Raise tax-free personal allowances from £6,035 to £8,000 for people earning under £20,000 a year and to £7,000 for those earning £20,000 to £25,000, which would be funded by a rise in tax on incomes over £80,000 and which would assist the lower-paid at a time of rocketing food prices.
That top limit of £25,000 implies he’s leaving personal allowances where they are for people earning over £25,000, so that they drop by £1,000, twice. Lots of people, including me, have suggested reshaping the tax system by raising allowances. But no-one I think has before suggested that it would be a vote-winner openly to treat very large numbers of people to marginal rates over 100% by clawing back an extra £200 when they cross an arbitrary threshold. Twice. At close to the median earnings level so the maximum numbers notice.
In fact, it was a disaster for Gordon Brown when he did it as a concealed one-time-only adjustment. Possibly it was the disaster for Gordon Brown, where he finally came unstuck. It’s probably not something he wants to try again once, Peter. Let alone twice.
Barataria – A new edict was promulgated last night forbidding the people from making public comments on clothing other than their own. The Master of Protocol is also looking at more severe punishments for seamstresses and button-makers who give fashion tips.
The Guild of Tailors has announced itself very pleased. “This is a major contribution to preserving the fine traditions of aristocratic couture, so recently under attack from vulgar speculation,” a spokesman said. “The country only just survived the panic and chaos recently caused to his Imperial Highness’ wardrobe by a malicious peasant-boy, so everyone can now understand where that sort of thing leads to. More sumptuary laws will mean an orderly clothes trade where people are able to buy what experts know is good for them at an approved price. “
Officially unofficial (as yet) information has it that SpaceX will try another test launch from Kwaj before the end of this month.
I will keep you informed.
I have been hearing that Sarah Palin was hacked and her private email put up on wikileaks. In addition some folk say they can not reach wikileaks and the FBI had shut it down as part of an investigation. Others say it is temporarily unreachable simply because so many people are trying to download. This has apparently been under discussion on SlashDot.
I am just in the door from lunch and that is the entirety of what I know that is not from the tinhat brigade. I have checked none of it and am unlikely to do so as I am expecting a call from New York any minute about some engineering work.
If the FBI is in the picture, I hope the crackers behind it get sent up river for a long time… and that they enjoy man-love from Islamic extremist prisoners.
I would say the same if they hacked Joe Biden’s mail box: “T’ain’t no diff’r’nce to me.” A crime is still a crime.
The Tories have opened up an almost 30 percentage point lead over Labour in the latest opinion poll in the Daily Telegraph. The opposition party is now polling over the 50 per cent point, the highest it has been since the heyday of Margaret Thatcher. An interesting point, as no doubt the jaundiced readers and contributors to Samizdata point out, is that the Conservatives have achieved this on the basis of remarkably little actual policy detail of their own, apart from stuff about changes to inheritance tax. In the early years, Tory leader David Cameron spent most of the time aping the mushy centre-ground noises of Blairism, with a strong, and possibly even sincere, attachment to notions of environmentalism and socially responsible corporations, the latter stance being a socialistic, or possibly even fascistic doctrine that is at odds with the notion that businesses should be run to serve the interests of those that own and run them.
All that has changed, and changed utterly. For a start, we do not hear much these days about the environment from Mr Cameron. Worries about global warming, at a time of economic fear and after a run of crap UK summers, do not cut it any more. The fact that mean global temperatures have actually dropped over the past 10 years is proving a bit of an awkward one. And the Tories’ economic mistakes of the early 1990s – joining the European exchange rate mechanism – are now far enough in the memory to no longer be as toxic as they once were.
Brown’s reputation is in ruins; his massive spending, raiding of private sector pensions and hideously complex tax changes have come back to haunt him. His creation of a semi-independent central bank no longer looks so clever given that he shifted the Bank of England’s inflation target to a different, and easier to hit, measure a few years ago, hence arguably stoking credit growth by an additional degree. Yes, some of the global credit crunch is outside of his, or indeed Britain’s control. But Brown sought to claim much of the credit for the fat years, so he cannot complain about getting some of the stick for the lean years.
As a side observation, a lady whom I met recently and who knows Cameron told me that he was a total shit. He would feign interest in a subject for about five minutes and then lose all interest. Not a good sign.
Update: The Taxpayers’ Alliance has a good and brutal report on what has happened to the UK economy during the Brown years, which will be available tomorrow. The Tories, if they had any intellectual fire-power, should be producing such reports. The TPA has held the torch for the cause for small government during a period when the Conservatives seemed barely able to mention the words “tax cut” without immediately rushing to tell people that they had no desire to be so cruel and nasty as to actually cut the size of the State. The TPA puts that party to shame.
Happily, you can still blame [Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher] Cox for something. He went as far out of his way as he could to enable the brokerage firms by harassing the small group of informed financial people who have been trying to tell the truth to the markets: the short sellers. They bet against the stock price of a company and so have always had a bad reputation with the public. But in this case, they are the closest thing we have to heroes.
– Michael Lewis, simultaneously making the points that having efficient markets in which it is easy for nay-sayers to short assets is likely to moderate the creation of bubbles and that government regulators have a horrible tendency to turn into cheerleaders for the industries they are supposed to be regulating.
“It can’t go on for much longer,” says one Cabinet member who described yesterday’s meeting as “excruciating: an embarrassment”.
“It’s not just the country that’s not listening to Gordon any longer: the Cabinet isn’t listening to him. Something is going to give. There were people staring at their hands, some scribbling on their papers, someone else on their BlackBerry.” Anything rather than look their own leader in the eye.
Mr Brown told his Cabinet that issues about the direction of the party should not be raised until after the present economic turmoil.
The minister adds: “Gordon is now measuring his survival in two-week horizons. It’s humiliating for everyone.”
– Anne McElvoy – quoted here, and I should imagine, there and everywhere during the next few days
Our suit has been filed in Texas.
You may remember my earlier article about this: both the Republicans and the Democrats missed the legal filing deadline in Texas. Unlike their suit against us in Pennsylvania, this is not a simple nuisance suit. There appears to be a clear legal issue.
The ruling parties have long gotten away with a one-sided set of ballot access laws. Laws are enforced against us but under the same circumstances they get a wink and a nudge and a pass.
Times change.
The Left are becoming desperate in their attempts to scaremonger and scapegoat the Big Crunch.
Gordon Brown’s stewardship of the Treasury over the past decade is now under scrutiny. He followed Alan Greenspan, worshipper at the feet of Ayn Rand, a free marketeer whose extreme and influential libertarianism let markets rip, kept interest rates too low and failed to regulate the banks’ wild lending. Britain, says the OECD, is in a worse position to weather the storm than most due to its dependence on an uncontrolled property boom. Many – including this paper – warned often of the madness of letting prices rise by £50 a day with a mortgage-based debt bonanza. Slashing capital gains tax, on the advice of private equity leaders who had Brown’s ear, set off a huge expansion in borrowing to snap up public companies. The buy-to-let market was allowed full rein, too, inflaming house prices. The Treasury heeded no warnings about the culture of 125% mortgages.
We must hang objectivists, ban ‘We The Living’ and jail all libertarians. Immediately. Or perhaps Polly Toynbee is wrong.
Rand must be laughing in her grave.
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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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