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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Just as I finished posting the previous, I noticed flashing lights outside. Northern Ireland Fire Department was in the parking lot… someone tried to burn down the small building next to where I live, where the laundry room is.
Fortunately I finished my laundry several hours ago.
Arson. It has to be because one of the flatmates caught an attempt last night and put it out before it caused much damage. Two nights in a row just are not accidents. And that’s not to mention a bin fire a couple weeks ago and a car torched while I was away.
Ah, the joys of living not far enough away from a bad area. There are definitely some kids up the road who need an introduction to rock salt… Hmmm. Can’t do that here. Have to give the poor dears money instead.
Oh yeah. the second floor is usually occupied by a young family. It’s empty at the moment, but…
I’ve heard and read some media pundits who after looking at the photos of the Hussein lads suggested one may have committed suicide. I cannot make a definitive judgement from a single angle and a not terribly good photograph… but I think not.
A bullet makes a small entry wound and a large exit wound. The photo shows a large hole in the right side of the head. If this were due to a bullet, the entry wound would be on the left. If it was a suicide, he held the pistol in his left hand.
Since I’ve never heard either of the two was a left hander, I will presume this was not the case. I’d bet on shrapnel from one of the missiles as the source of the wound.
On July 21st, 1969 Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin returned from the Moon after joining up with Michael Collins who had orbited overhead.
The last man set foot on the moon a few years later. All the hard work and miraculous efforts of thousands of dedicated scientists and engineers was thrown into the dustbin of history. World experts on esoteric science and engineering fields were fired and drove taxis to feed their families.
This is what happens when you place your faith in the State.
Photo D. Amon all rights reserved
Down load and play this song (vocals Julia Ecklar, words and music Bill Roper)
If you still don’t understand then you have no soul and I can’t help you.
When was the last time you heard anything about neutral particle beam technology? It seems like it almost vanished from the vocabulary after the 1980’s “Star Wars” program. From the information released by defense sources over the last few years one would conclude there isn’t much happening in that field. One might have concluded it was found to be a dead end.
But… why is everything to do with neutral particle beam technology included in the State Department’s ITAR Munitions List? In the most recent revision I’ve looked at (Sept 19, 2002) energy weapons technology has been promoted to an even higher profile. Neutral particle beams are included.
I wonder what’s going on out in the desert that I don’t know about?
Glenn Reynolds is off to see the Granny today but left behind this bombshell from an article in the Tennessean written by a former boss of his:
Halfway down the middle column is written: ”Abid Al-Karim Muhamed Aswod, intelligence officer responsible for the coordination of activities with the Osama bin Laden group at the Iraqi embassy in Pakistan.
The statement is by Judge Gilbert S. Merritt of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. He is currently with an ABA judicial-assistance mission in Iraq.
A reminder for our readers: the next few days are a time of demonstration in support of Iranian students. Oxblog has posted a list of times and places he is aware of. If any are near you, by all means go!
I’ve been reading the discussion about Brian’s post on a possible USAF suborbital spaceplane project. It seems to me much of the discussion is overblown and ungrounded in reality. This is the expected next generation of military aircraft. An acquaintance of mine, Mitchell Burnside Clapp, championed a military space plane project named “Black Horse” a decade ago when he was a USAF officer. I have some of his papers on my islandone web site. Mitchell has been involved with commercial space ventures since he left the military.
This is not an ICBM or an ICBM derivative we are talking about. That is a non-starter for practical vehicles, whether for the warfighter or the commuter. It will be an aeroplane with a rocket engine. If it is a descendant of Mitchell’s design studies it will use in-flight refueling to top off the tanks. This reduces the weight of landing gear. They will only need to support a partially fueled craft. Once such a craft drops away from the tanker, it lights up and goes suborbital. It is not that much different operationally from the SR-71, it just goes a bit faster and higher.
Perhaps the USAF will buy from some of my other friends. There are some in the Mojave desert who would be more than happy to scale up to their suborbital design (XCOR). Brian has indicated this is a DARPA initiative, so contracts to companies like XCOR are a very real possibility. DARPA likes small groups with new ideas and has very little red tape or strings attached to their funding. I know. I’ve worked on DARPA projects myself.
This could be the real start of the commercial space launch industry. Greg Maryniak of the X-Prize organization has at various time spoken on this point. The early days of aviation were done privately and their products were then purchased by government. So airplanes are, in the minds of the person on the street, a commercial product. Rockets were built by and for government projects. Apollo made space travel a “government product” in the common mind. It was a false start and it has delayed space travel by decades. It sent us down a dead end road of manned artillery rockets and giant white winged elephants.
We are about to see a total conceptual change. People like those at X-Prize are changing the mind set. There are a dozen or more small companies building suborbital aerospace planes and ships. At least one (Rutan) will fly by the end of the year (target is mid-December on Wright Brothers first flight anniversary); several more will probably fly in the following 2 years. We are about to go back in time and start the space program over. This time we’ll do it the way the Wright Brothers, Glenn Curtiss and others did it. Privately but with the odd military or mail contract to keep body and soul together.
Suborbital aircraft are no revolution in aerial warfare. They bring no completely new capability to the USAF. It is advantageous to the aircrews. I am sure they will very much appreciate flight times of 1.5 hours instead of fourteen and up. As to those on the recieving end… I don’t much think they care what time the bomber took off and how long it flew before sending them off to Valhalla.
Where it may well be revolutionary is in US basing policy. It won’t change things over night. In a couple decades closure of US overseas air bases may be a viable policy option. That’s a salutory effect from where I sit.
We already are seeing the start of a retrenchment of US global forces. I suggested this outcome some months ago. We are moving large numbers of our forces out of Europe; we have moved out of Saudi Arabia; US troops are being pulled back from the truce line in North Korea. I can’t see us maintaining a high profile in Turkey any more. Even worse than being unreliable, they have had been working to assasinate leaders and destabilize the Kurdish areas of Iraq. Turkish black ops guys on such missions have been captured by US forces at least twice. We will be stuck in Afghanistan and Iraq for a long time, but it will not be comparable to the fifty year deployments in Germany and South Korea.
You may argue whether the US government intends this trajectory. Nonetheless, we are on it. The time will come when we can force a return to a “Fortress America” defense posture. There is no other possible path that will make it politically feasible for us to militarily disengage from the world. If we can defend ourselves against any attacker from anywhere on the globe and do so quickly from our own shores, we can satisfy worries of the most paranoid Hawk.
At the same time we will decrease our target profile amongst the nutcases of the world.
Some weeks ago I saw a clip of an old Bogart movie and it started me thinking about the type of film it represented. That old Raymond Chandler thing: dark streets, smoke filled rooms, double and triple crosses, collaborators shot in the night… I forgot about it until a few days ago when Kathryn Hepburn died. Her obituary mentioned the classic movie “African Queen”.
We are in a perfect age for the return of Film Noir. Imagine a Bogart-like character in Baghdad. Think of the plot possibilities! You’ve secret caches of billions in gold, diamonds and dollars. There are buried hordes of poison gas, anthrax and smallpox. We can stretch reality for Hollywood’s sake and toss in an operational nuke or two, soon to be sold to a high ranking al Qaeda.
The Russians didn’t hold a candle to the Nazi’s for pure evil. Films about them didn’t have that stark manichean good versus evil quality of the era surrounding WWII… or of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. You have perfect villains, with no redeeming human qualities, in the members of his inner circle.
The escaped Arch-Villain Saddam in his secret hideaways is the nearest thing to a Fu Manchu class villain we are ever likely to see in reality.
Here’s a starter for our Hollywood readers (and I know you are out there Brian).
Bogart, a grizzled US Army veteran working in civil reconstruction, becomes involved with a beautiful Iraqi woman. Her brother is under threat by the Saddam Fedaheen and she wants Bogie’s help in extricating him. Our hero gets drawn deeper and deeper into a dark plot that sees him wandering the streets of old parts of Baghdad at night, shots flashing in the night, the occasional dead bad guy….
We end up in a finale with Bogie trying to save the girl and stop the nasty utterly evil guys from doing their utterly dasterdly deed against total innocents.
This stuff would sell like hotcakes in the US right now.
Last week I posted a scan of a rather tattered magazine picture of Strom Thurmond surrounded by marshmallows on the stage of the CMU Skibo Ballroom, circa 1970.
It seems the original student photographer is one of our readers. This blast from the past duly reminded him of this classic image and he has sold it to Reuters. You can see a much better copy of Jerry Siskind’s photo there.
This is likely to lead to a lengthy exchange of do-you-remembers betwixt us!
Ever since the US implemented software patents, the EU has been determined not to be left behind. According to an item in Debian News:
“More on European Software Patents. An article at ZDNet UK says that the EU bureaucrats aren’t even considering the numerous anti-software patenting opinions out there. According to a well-connected lobbyist group, they have determined there will be patents, and the only question is what kind.”
Software patents are a very bad idea as many have discovered in the US. They put a fence around parts of mathematics. Even worse, the government guardians of the fencemaking are not familiar with the field and its’ literature and are vastly understaffed to boot. This has led to some gawdawfully silly (and economically destructive) patents being granted.
Within the last couple years BT tried to claim a patent in the US on hyperlinks1. This was shot down after a massive search by the open source community. It ended with the web publication of a late 1960’s lecture discussing the idea.
Virtually everything in well done programming is “obvious” when you get “there”, down to the core of the problem at hand. Two top programmers given a reasonable time to attack a complex problem will very likely find large sections of their work very similar if not almost identical.
A program in a well formed language is equivalent to a mathematical expression. Such expressions are in most cases transformable into each other.
The Debian News cited article can be found here
1 = 01/07/2000 NewScientist p017 “The Net Strikes Back: BT tries To Patent links”
This item just in from Fox News:
“NEC initially plans to introduce a computer with a fuel-cell system able to run for five consecutive hours on a single cartridge of methanol fuel, but also plans to make a PC within two years that can run continuously for as long as 40 hours”
If they get up to 40 hours on a single refillable charge, the laptop becomes a useful accessory for wilderness work where power is far away. This will be a major boon to naturalists, geologists and other field scientists.
It will also be of immense advantage to Special Forces. A long lived and lighter portable equipment power technology is certain to be welcome in the backpack.
While opinions may vary on the correctness of the opinions of people who believe the income tax was illegally instituted – and there is some historical evidence that on the issue of employer withholding they are correct – few libertarians would disagree they have a right to say it.
That right is exactly what is being abridged:
“On Monday, June 16, Federal District Court Judge Lloyd D. George issued a preliminary injunction banning the sale and distribution of Irwin Schiff’s book about the income tax titled, “The Federal Mafia: How The Government Illegally Imposes And Unlawfully Collects Income Taxes And How Americans Can Fight Back.”
Say what you will, this is a rather vile and blatant breach of the First Amendment. Judge George should be severely reprimanded.
If you are interested in very large court documents, I’ve made the Court Order available for reading.
And speaking of Judges who should be reprimanded… A Texas judge who was in trouble once before has reverted to his previous bad behavior and placed a tax withholding protestor in jail without bond and after improper procedures.
This was after a previous hearing in which the judge nearly laughed the State out of court over their claim the dissenting corporate CEO was a flight risk. While their victim is in jail, the IRS is spreading rumours the company has been dissolved. Creditors are calling the victimized company demanding cash payments.
Just one more example of “Your Government Servicing You”… like a bull with a cow…
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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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