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]

They did bury us and we just did not notice

One begins to wonder if Krushchev was right in 1959 when he said “We will bury you”. We just thought he meant economically rather than socially. I am beginning to wonder how many differences between the current Russian and American governments will be left if we have a few more years of an executive branch which ignores the Constitution. According to this article in World News Daily we are now going to have a biometric database on anyone that anyone in the adminstration does not like and it will have no oversight or means of challenge whatever:

Although the directives run over 1,700 words in length, Congress is not mentioned once, nor is there any specification of how the coordinated “framework” will be disclosed to the public.

and:

The directives also do not specify any procedures for citizens to challenge their inclusion in the biometric database or any resulting consequences, such as restricted travel or additional government surveillance.

I am certainly not anti-defense minded but I would humbly suggest that no CITIZEN should have such information kept on them and if a non-citizen becomes a citizen all such information should be destroyed forthwith and severe legal penalties should exist for violations.

I fully expect this will be as effective and as competently kept a database as the no fly list, which is to say real terrorists will walk through and free and sovereign Americans will get the treatment by some jerk with a rubber glove.

Metabolism 2.0

Looking for a real boost in the morning? Someday you may be able to do better than coffee. According to New Scientist (via the Foresight Institute):

Human cells could have their metabolisms upgraded without altering their genes by inserting tiny plastic packages of enzymes, Swiss researchers have shown. They hope the technique could allow advanced cancer therapies, or even upgrade a person’s metabolism.

I can hardly begin to imagine the applications. With this technique you could correct chronic genetically caused disorders. It makes drugs old hat. You could boost athletic performance from inside the cell and really give the luddite sports crowd something to worry about.

Imagine the battlefield applications! It could keep the 21st century soldier alert despite little sleep; alive when injured; fed from sunlight or other external energy sources and performance enhanced when under threat.

LP choses Bob Barr

The Libertarian Party convention has, as most of us expected, selected Bob Barr as our candidate. As I have been on the road the last month I have not had an opportunity to do much in the way of research on the man. I intend to correct that in the ensuing weeks.

The major party election landscape is about as dismal and disgusting as it has ever been. I would not support John McCain (author of the infamous anti-First Amendment limitation on political speech McCain-Feingold Act) if he were running against the Satan-Cthulu ticket. Had Hillary Clinton been the Democratic winner, I might have given her luke warm support simply because she is a rational political animal and thus predictable. She would be less likely to do something immature and stupid. True, she would have been as bad for our ideals as McCain, albeit in different areas, but at least she is not John McCain.

I might add that the bitter pill would have been considerably sweetened by the probable ascension of a very old and dear friend to top policy wonk in space affairs. There is barely day light between her ideas and mine on what has to happen to NASA over the next 20 years. It would have been a joy to have her in a high position, but that is not to be.

So… I am firmly back where I have been as a voter for the majority of my majority: it is the LP candidate or nothing. So who is Bob Barr? Is he a suitable carrier of our banner?

For those who know even less than I about the man, he is a former Republican Congressman from Georgia who became a card carrying Libertarian about a year and a half ago and seems to have accepted our ideas and platform in toto. His legislative history prior to that has some flaws from our perspective but he does not appear to have ever been a truly hard core statist. He does indeed appear to be someone who was philosophically close to us on many issues and finally crossed the line, decided some of his prior stands were in error and ‘outed’ himself as one of us.

We know we are not going to put our man in the Oval Office so our candidate requirements are different from those of the Republicans and Democrats. We need a communicator and a teacher. We need someone who will attract reasonable media attention. Our candidates job is to move another slice of the citizenry towards a belief in the importance of individual liberty. He must educate the electorate on the death of a thousand cuts the ‘major’ parties have been applying to the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. Purity is not as important as effectiveness.

I will naturally make up my own mind but at this point it is Barr or stay home. I am leaning towards supporting him and I am interested in the views, pro and con, of other libertarians. Can Bob Barr reap what Ron Paul has sown for us? Can he consolidate those gains and extend them over the next five months?

A half a million pounds of thrust…

On May 29th, SpaceX tested the Falcon 9 first stage in its Macgregor Texas test stand with
five engines.

Rather impressive, n’est-ce pas?

Sun power

‘The Caballeros’ of the National Space Security Office were awarded the National Space Society’s prestigious ‘Space Pioneer Award’ this evening for their work in bringing the possibilities of Space Based Solar power to the attention of the powers that be and pretty much every one else.

Although these ideas have been known ‘forever’ amongst my circles, they have been out of the limelight for decades due to a Carter-era hatchet job.

So, congrats to our friends in DOD, and new found drinking buddy Coyote Smith!

description
The Caballeros receive their just rewards for saving the planet. Coyote is second from right. I’ll add other names later.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

Speaking of drinking… there is a party in the suite down the hall, so that is me away!

Return of the thunder lizards

Could we bring back a Dinosaur? It is a fascinating idea. After watching a documentary on the ‘Dinosaur Mummy’ found in the badlands of the Dakotas I was forced to ponder the idea once again, Since last night I saw adverts for a Discovery documentary on this very topic that will be on next week I decided I should record my ideas on the subject post haste.

Pretty much everyone has seen the movie ‘Jurassic Park’ where scientists find strands of dino DNA inside assorted biting dino-pests preserved in ancient amber. The problem with this scenario is no such viable DNA has ever been found. It is highly unlikely any has survived intact over the many millions of years seperating us from the end of the Cretaceous when dino-kind had a very bad day.

Given the unlikelihood of finding a T Rex blueprint, one might think the idea of bringing them or any of their relatives back is an idea well and truly dead. “Time to consign the idea to the pages of fantasy stories!”, one might say… but not so fast!

There are other approaches to the problem. Researchers are churning out genomes of many, many species per year even now, including that of the Mammoth and the Neaderthal. The rate at which this happens is expected to reach a species per day per machine in less than a decade. That opens up a whole new possibility: reverse engineering.

Let us say we have the genomes of most living dinosaurs sequenced and sitting in databases on our computers of the 2030’s. “Living dinosaurs? Where?”, you say.
Open your window. Listen to those little dinos chirping, cheeping, singing and in general making a racket as they fly about. They are direct descendants of the dinosaur Raptor clade. Not a side shoot: a direct, bona-fide descendant.

So for a start let us run our AI programs and use our species genome data base to work our way backwards through bird ancestors. The results will not be a full dinosaur genome but we will be getting closer. We might even find some 100,000 year old bits of DNA from dead species in the Russian tundra with which we can cross check our calculations.

We can work the other direction to some extent as well, if we work backwards in the mammalian, crocodilian and reptilian trees until we get to the common ancestor between each of them and the dinosaur clan. It will be rough and full of holes, but it adds constraints and that is what we need.

It is still not enough though. The next step requires we that we understand how DNA and DNA regulation actually builds a creature. If we can infer the DNA required for a feature we can tweak our model genome to fit. Now the coup de grace: if you have seen a documentary called ‘Dino Lab’ you will know where I am going. We now have the ability to roughly model the entire animal and to use AI learning programs to understand how it moved and what its metabolism was like. We have fossilized stomach contents. We have examples of skin and organs fossilized in the ‘Dino Mummy’. With a few more orders of magnitude of computing power, we might run Monte Carlo simulations of entire sections of ancient ecosystems until we find the best match to fossil evidence.

With those constraints on reality we will, before the end of this century, be able to infer with reasonable confidence the genome of a dinosaur and, if we wish to do so, bring it back. It will not be a perfect reproduction but it will certainly be good enough to make a day at the zoo a rather exciting affair!

Phoenix Lander, live

If you are interested in watching the Phoenix Mars Lander land, click here.

Phoenix is down! Congrats to the Phoenix team!

The usual suspects

Under the title ‘Physicists raise questions on EMR capabilities’ Janes, (a subscription only publisher) reports:

Two US physicists have claimed that the European Mid-course Radar (EMR), due to be installed in the Czech Republic in a planned expansion of the US ballistic missile defence system, is substantially underpowered, and will form part of “a defence system that is unable to provide any discrimination services against missiles launched from Iran to the eastern half of the continental United States”. George Lewis, associate director of the Peace Studies Program at Cornell University, and Theodore Postol, professor of science, technology, and national security policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, are both opponents of US missile defence plans.

Anyone who has followed military space systems should be quite familiar with the consistently negative and consistently incorrect claims of Dr. Postel. If one were to believe his writings in Scientific American and other publications in the 1980’s we should never have tried to build anti-missile systems because they are impossible.

One must wonder if Dr Postel is sullying the good name of Physics in defense of his political preference for a global OK Corral gunfight, a world seemingly frozen in a timeless instant before the first gunfighter makes a false move. With only two gunfighters that standoff might well last a very long time and thankfully did. With more players the chance of a miscalculation ending in a free for all grows exponentially.

Thankfully, the good doctor was wrong in his eighties predictions about what would be possible now, so we are rapidly moving away from his MAD dream world.

The first decades of the age of nuclear weapons were an historical anomaly, Our newly operational systems will mature rapidly over the next two decades and in so doing will re-instate the natural balance between offense and defense.

The Revolution: A Manifesto

Glenn Reynold’s has a review at Pajamas Media of Ron Paul’s best selling new treatise, “The Revolution: A Manifesto”.

He has beaten me to the punch as my copy is waiting for me in New York City and I will not see it until Thursday, No problem though: Glenn seems to have almost exactly the same opinions I expect I will have. This is not so strange after all. We are both Heinlein Libertarians with a long shared background.

I guess I will just have to sit back in my favorite upper west Columbia University hangout (a Starbucks) and watch some of the regulars go apoplectic. Some times I just like to be evil.

But you knew that.

Pipe bomb attacks in San Diego

Glenn Reynolds links to this article on not one, but two different pipe bombings in San Diego.

I suspect the answer to the question “Why Haven’t We Heard About This” is to be found in the lack of blood and bodies.

No bleed, no lead.

End to Massachusetts income tax is another step closer

From time to time I have covered the efforts of libertarian heroes Carla Howell and Michael Cloud to bring about an end to the Massachusetts income tax. They succeeded in the collection and complex certification of a huge number of signatures; they defeated an underhanded counter-attack by the teachers union; they even overcame a law-breaking legislature:

Fourth, although the Massachusetts Constitution requires the state legislature to take testimony on and vote on our END the Income Tax Ballot Initiative, the legislature refused to obey the Constitution. The legislature refused to invite us to give testimony. They refused to vote on our initiative.

Fortunately, the legislature cannot exercise a “pocket veto,” cannot block a ballot initiative by refusing to comply with the state Constitution. A Massachusetts Supreme Court decision allows our Initiative to move forward – even when the legislature violates the state Constitution.

Now they have one more hurdle before they get on the ballot. Another twenty thousand signature collected, distributed to each town for certification and then delivered to the appropriate State official by June 9.

Should be a dawdle for those two, but if you want to help you can do so here.

By the way, I will be working the JPMorgan Tech08 show in Boston later this month.

Born a hundred million years too soon

I am not certain whom I should pity the most: the Intelligent Design advocates of Homo Sapiens or the future Scientists of the next technological species on our planet.

Much of what we know of the past is built on the fossil record and most of the rest upon the exponentially increasing DNA databases of fully sequenced life forms. For us it is an easy matter, in a relative manner of speaking, to follow characteristics through the billions of years of the fossil record and to compare DNA of long diverged species for commonality. In all cases it is the downright bad engineering of life forms that screams out to the designer that these things just grew and developed by a series of random local optimizations.

This will not be true for our future brethren. When they dig up their rocks they will find a point in the fossil record at which there is an explosive radiation of new and interesting lifeforms that have total disconnects with past life forms. They will see a discontinuity in life itself. Geneticists will see the unmistakable evidence of engineering perfection in the deep past of critters of their day.

What will they make of it? Will they accept that a prior technological species lost in deep time re-engineered life? Will their theologians believe in a universe that created itself and then had a God descend and set it right? Or a God that created things imperfectly and came back to fix His screwups? Will they expect Him to return to Fix Things again? Will they have a Cosmic Tinker in place of a Cosmic Watchmaker?

Just a few thought for a Sunday afternoon…