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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It is my understanding there are now five hundred cities on the tea party list. I hope all good Samizdata readers (or at least that subset of which resides in the middle half of the North American continent) get out their signs and show their anger this coming April 15th!
The ‘Main Stream Media’, as Glenn Reynolds approximately put it, will be hiring extra people that day to do the hard graft journalistic work of ignoring the nationwide demonstrations by hundreds to thousands of people in what may well be one for the Guinness records. There may be the largest number of simultaneous demonstrations in American history on Tax Day 2009.
It actually does not matter that MSM will be absent as no one pays any attention to them any more any way. I can literally not remember the last time I read a ‘dead tree’ newspaper. I do not even own a working TV anymore. I doubt I am alone. They are irrelevant and obsolete.
I you want coverage, go to Pajamas TV. I would not be surprised if Reason TV covered some of it as well. For daily information, keep an eye on Glenn Reynolds.
I will not be on that side of the Atlantic in time for the fun, but I do have a few sign suggestions. (Some are mine and some are golden oldies):
“I’m Capitalist and I’m Proud!”
“Go Galt!”
“Screw the Welfare State!”
“Legalize Freedom!”
“Pelosi Go Home!”
“The Mafia would steal less!”
“Taxation is Theft”
“Smash the State!”
Feel free suggest other sign ideas for the tea partiers!
Later: I have recently been exchanging email with J Neil Schulman and that reminds me of how prophetic his 1979 Prometheus award winning novel Alongside Night is of current events, even if we are only in the prequel stages of his story.
I just picked this up form a Jane’s newsletter:
US announces successful tests of Airborne Laser
The US Missile Defense Agency (MDA) successfully fired multiple long-duration blasts of the Northrop Grumman high-energy Airborne Laser (ABL) during ground tests, the company announced on 19 February. The tests for the Boeing 747-400F-based ballistic missile defence system lasted up to three seconds each and were concluded on 12 February
This is good progress, but I am still waiting for the real test: shooting down an ICBM in flight.
Way back in 1994 or thereabouts I wrote in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society about future applications of nanotechnology on spacecraft to get sensing in depth across all wavelengths in all directions at once. Well, it looks like we are getting there:
THE NEXT GENERATION.
Beyond the realm of CMOS and CCD image sensors, SiOnyx Inc. is developing a new material called “black silicon.” The company believes the material will lead to a new class of image sensors that are 100 times more sensitive than conventional silicon, detect energy from the ultraviolet to the short-wave infrared bands, operate at very low voltage levels, and can be made in extremely thin 0.5-µm forms (Fig. 5). Most importantly, the material is compatible with existing CMOS processing methods.
“This is a brand new material that is compatible with the largest manufacturing infrastructure of the world,” says Stephen Saylor, SiOnyx’s president and CEO.
I am guessing that ‘black silicon’ might be carbon nanotube technology or it might simply be an array that is so good at sucking up light that it appears black due to lack of wasted reflected photons. Whatever the case, I believe this is just the start of the sort of sensors I would like to see on spacecraft.
Kentucky Liz, one of our commentariat noted:
Actually, the “mad as hell” scene from the movie Network is circulating like wildfire on facebook. An old college buddy and I were joking around and cooked up a cockamamie idea to have the same screamfest, but when to do it? Tax Day! April 15, noon ET and equivalent times in other time zones. Noon ET–the politicians and financiers more likely to be out for lunch, to witness people pouring into the streets screaming.
Here’s a link to this facebook group/event, please join us, especially Amurricans. Should appeal to the tea party crowd so active nowadays!
The face book page is here
It somehow seems fitting to have a good scream on Rape Day…
…and Carla Howell has just the song to put you in the mood!
The Cato Institute has the report.
Now that leftists at Harvard want to portray laissez-faire philosophy as being somewhat akin to a mental disorder, maybe the next step will be re-education camps for Cato staff? Maybe the next “stimulus” bill could include a few earmarks for such facilities? I’m keeping my fingers crossed that I get sent some place warm.
South Park could not even come up with these characters.
Unless American politicians and bureaucrats wise up, there will be a second war with Mexico within a generation.
This is not hyperbole. Drug lords are taking over the border areas between the two countries. Killings are spreading into American cities in the southwest. Firefights near the border are becoming common. There have been kidnappings within the United States in which some of the perpetrators are thought to have not only been using military equipment, but may have been moonlighting Mexican police or military men.
Before you begin to vent your rage on Mexico, I would like you to ponder the source of the problem. This is not an ideological battle where the world vision of the enemy is independent of what we think or do. That is what we face in the Middle East. Our actions there may affect Islamist strategy and tactics, but not their dream. We are not the creators of that problem.
The problem in Mexico is an entirely capitalist one. There are goods which are in great demand. Those goods are profitable and over nearly four decades we have caused a vast global giga-billion dollar industry to come into existence where once there were college students smuggling trunks of grass over the border at Spring Break. That is also not hyperbole. One of the floors of a dorm next to mine did exactly that and supplied the entire CMU campus back in the 1969-71 era. Then came Nixon and ‘Operation Intercept’. And what was the great accomplishment of this at the time great expenditure of taxpayer money? Why, by the time I left grad school prices had doubled, tripled or more and nearly all the smuggling was in the hands of organized crime instead of paying the tuition, room and board of a few engineering students. Even so, enforcement at the time was a still a joke, and much laughed at even as it transitioned from “Berkeley to Boston Forty Brick Lost Bag Blues” to Cheech and Chong’s “Up In Smoke”.
So what did the moralizing Statists do? Admit their failure? Apply tax payer money to something useful? Of course not… they did what governments always do with failures. They increased the budget. When that failed utterly they increased it again. And again. And again. Meanwhile, Libertarians correctly predicted disaster after disaster, decade after decade. Drugs are money and all that it buys. We put drug entrepreneurs outside of our then liberal legal framework… so they adapted and operated by the old fashioned rules of Feudalism.
Feudalism is the name we gave to violent gangs far enough in the past that we can romanticize them as Princes, Princesses, Knights and the like. The rules of the Feudal game are simple. You murder your way to the top then you pillage your competitors and steal their land and resources. If you are a mean enough SOB you get to live a life of sybaritic luxury… until someone nastier and smarter and more underhanded comes along and cuts your throat.
Fifteen hundred years ago it came about due to the post-Roman power vacuum. In our era the power vacuum is in a parallel world and economy. It is outside of our laws and nation states, by our own hands, and it exists side by side with us at every point.
Every time we drive up the cost of doing business, the feudal lords of this parallel universe counter predictably. The government of the United States succeeds only in adding to their cost of doing business. You might imagine that would be a big thing… but Statists have probably increased the cost of doing legal business even more over those decades. The more regulation, the more laws, the more taxes, the more individuals will find the ‘other side’ preferable.
Twenty-five years ago US military men stated they wanted nothing to do with the War on Drugs. Getting involved in it would put their institution at risk of bribary and corruption. The moralistic morons in government would have none of it. The military was called upon to run interdictions at sea and in the air to find potential smugglers. They have been countered by minisubs, UAV’s, counter-radar and a whole range of technological counter-measures. Every escalation provides the income necessary for the counter-escalation.
We have arrived at a predictable state of affairs. Feudal lords are now taking over portions of ‘our’ universe in which they hold the balance of power. Border provinces in Mexico are under their control. Military resources are appearing in their hands. Soon their private gangs will morph into real armies. They will bribe American military men and politicians. Where bribery does not work, they will kidnap and kill children and rape wives as object lessons in what happens when you dare to disobey the new royalty.
A time will come when the Mexican National government is absorbed. What do you think is going to happen then? When Mexican Special Forces are carrying out hits against any American who gets in the way of business, things are going to get very, very ugly. There will be calls to invade our southern neighbor and reasonable people will then have to agree there is no other choice. If and when it comes to that, we will have absolutely no one but our leaders to blame. It will be 100% their fault for getting us there.
You can not stop contraband. You can only make smugglers rich and powerful enough to buy you out or kill you.
Government is an institution that has evolved along with we humans as our best means of applying violence. When you want to break things and kill people, there is no better institution for the job. The problem comes when we attempt to use it for other purposes. Its true skills will out even when the goal is entirely different, as with the current attempts of States to ‘help’ the economy.
What I see happening in the US and UK and other places with maximally ‘helpful’ governments is much like what happens when you accidentally spill Nitric Acid on the rug. It steams, bubbles, gets hots and makes a bit of sound and for a short while it appears that ‘something is happening’. Then the smoke clears and you see that it has ruined your rug.
Government ‘help’ is like that.
I have just been reading an article in this month’s Scientific American that has me smiling from ear to ear. One of the difficult problems for ‘strong nanotechnology’ has been cracked: how do you handle C3I with millions or billions of nanoassemblers? How do you program them? How do you tell them when to start and stop or do something different? How do they report problems, lack of raw materials, whatever?
University of California Berkeley physicist Dr. Alex Zettl and colleagues have built nanoscale radio receivers and transmitters using a single buckeytube each. One tube performs all the actions of an AM radio. Antenna. Tuner. Amplifier. Demodulator. Best of all this is not just theory. It already works well enough to communicate to and from the human scale at this primitive stage of development.
I might add that if you can turn radio waves into mechanical energy at the nanoscale, then you also have another tool in the nanoparts box for feeding energy to nanosystems.
This is big.
While doing some research for other purposes I ran across this excellent video of a B-2 stalling and crashing on takeoff. If you have the vaguest interest in aviation I am sure you will find this as fascinating as I did.
All escaped unscathed except the USAF budget.
I am beginning to wonder whether the enemy outside or the enemy within is the more dangerous to our liberty. The al Qaeda can kill me… but DHS can enslave me. Here is the latest loathsome attack on private property and our rights as free citizens, courtesy of Downsize DC:
The same one-size-fits-all regulations will apply to both passenger airliners and non-commercial, business-owned jets that are used to move cargo and personnel. For instance, the “no-fly” list and Air Marshall provisions will apply to business planes even though the pilots usually know everyone on board personally. The definition of “large aircraft” is arbitrary, applying both to planes as small as 12,500 pounds and to 747’s ten times that weight. Items that are prohibited in passenger jets will also be banned to employees in these smaller business planes, even if they are needed for their work. (Just think of what that will do to business
efficiency in this time of recession.) Airplane owners will be forced to pay, at their own expense, for audits of their safety compliance. The audits won’t even be done by government inspectors, but by private consultants. These rules can potentially expand to all aircraft and all airports.
There is more here.
Crazed Islamic fundamentalists cannot destroy our country. No one in the world, nor any alliance of enemies or ‘friends’ can destroy the United States.
Only we can do that… and ‘we’ are racing to see how quickly we can snuff the light of Liberty.
I am sure my title is no surprise to most of you, however the scale of the trouble is even worse than I had believed.
Unlike the fringe tribal areas, Swat, which has 1.3 million residents and a rich cultural history, is part of Pakistan proper, within 160 kilometers of Peshawar, Rawalpindi and Islamabad, the capital.
After more than a year of fighting, virtually all of it is now under Taliban control, marking the militants’ farthest advance eastward into Pakistan’s so-called settled areas, residents and government officials from the region say.
I very much hope there are contingency plans in place to blow the &$#^& out of Pakistan’s nuclear capability should worst come to worst. The alternative is a nuclear war against India in the name of Allah, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of millions in the region.
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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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