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]
|
Dave Carr’s post reminds me of an idea I’ve had for ages.
I often consult for long periods in in Manhattan. It’s normal there to see people standing outside on the street for a cig break. It’s such a common sight you just stop noticing it.
It also takes up a lot of peoples time. Some co-workers in one company I consulted for (pre dotBomb) went out for a puff nearly every hour.
Perhaps NYC Libertarians should carry gummed stickers sized to fit the US cig package warning. Every time you see someone standing on the street, give them one.
Imagine thousands of New Yorkers standing on the street with packages saying: “If I’d voted Libertarian I wouldn’t be standing here”.
Use your imagination.
There is room for a similar tactic here in the UK. Our health Nazi’s are so overt it leaves them open to really easy ridicule. Why pull punches at all?
“Health Nazi’s make an ASH of themselves.”
“ASH doesn’t know shite”.
“I vote Libertarian: my diseased lungs are my own business”.
The mind just boggles.
I read of Strom Thurmond’s demise at the ripe old age of a century and it sent me digging madly through an old trunk for this most memorable magazine photo of his 1970 visit to my alma mater:
This was at the hieght of the Viet-nam anti-war movement at CMU and Pitt and students of those universities formed a coalition of the willing to pepper the good Senator with Marshmallows.
My guerilla theatre troop later used the deadly Cluster Marshmallow against the Pittsburgh Federal Building with equally devastating results. One of the troop told me a checkout clerk at the grocery store asked him, “What Senator is in town this week?”, when he purchased the case of them for our “event”.
Oh the Horror! The Horror… and the memories. God it was fun!
Paul Wolfowitz is on my wavelength on this one:
“I guess this is, and I’m going to have to go, but I think it is worth emphasizing that these guys lack the two classical ingredients of a victory in a so-called guerilla war if that’s what you want to say they’re conducting. They lack the sympathy of the population and they lack any serious source of external support. They are getting some of these foreign killers coming in which is fine. It’s better to kill them in Iraq than have to have them come and get killed in the United States. But basically they’re on their own in a population that I think can and will be turned.”
It’s far better for us if we attract the crazies to a killing ground of our choosing. The more the merrier!
It appears the US is not the only nation fed up with the UN:
“The Australian government on Thursday branded multilateral forums such as the United Nations as “ineffective and unfocused” and said its future foreign policy would increasingly rely on “coalitions of the willing” like the one that waged war in Iraq.”
Strewth!
Sometimes things cross my desk which are so interesting I have to just pass them on verbatim. I’ve been expecting this one for years. In 1999 I walked under the wings of the Proteus high altitude aircraft in the Rutan hanger at Mojave. I knew immediately that Rutan had to be thinking of this as a first stage prototype. I also knew that I would not hear about such a thing until roll out.
Rollout day has finally arrived.
Here is a press release from Huntsville L5.
Huntsville Rocket Man Key Player in First Private Manned Space Program
Legacy Ties to Local HAL5 HALO Program
In the early morning hours of April 18, before the in burning heat blasted the Mojave Desert, the hangar doors swing open to reveal yet another strange craft with the obvious signature of the designer. Burt Rutan, President of Scaled Composites LLC, thus unveiled “The First Private Manned Space Program” with the roll-out of the suborbital SpaceShipOne. SpaceShipOne will be air-launched from the “White Knight” high-altitude research aircraft at 50,000 feet. Once released, SpaceShipOne will fire its rocket engine and climb to over 100 km (62 miles), carrying a crew of three into space on a suborbital flight. The rocket engine that will enable this historic feat was co-developed by Huntsville-native Timothy L. Pickens, who served as the Propulsion Systems Developer for Scaled Composites.
Tim first met Burt Rutan (designer of the famous Voyager aircraft) at an AIAA event in Huntsville in 1998. Because of their common interests, a professional rapport developed that would lead to Burt asking Tim to move to Mojave and lead a very important part of this “history in the making.” From what started out as napkin sketches with Burt in a Huntsville restaurant became what was rolled out in the Mojave. The propulsion concept was very much rooted in the Rocket City. Tim’s contributions to the SpaceShipOne project drew extensively from his involvement in HAL5’s High Altitude Lift-Off (HALO) Program. HALO pioneered the high-altitude launch of hybrid rockets.
Tim’s SpaceShipOne responsibilities included main and RCS propulsion development, nitrous-oxide portable fill station, rocket motor test stand, ECS support, propulsion fluids, and pressurization. Two hybrid motor vendors were selected to handle the fuel pouring, injector/valve design, and engine controller. This allowed Tim to reduce Scaled’s workload, decrease costs, and focus on the complex issues of designing the hybrid rocket motor, fuel case, and nozzle.
SpaceShipOne’s hybrid rocket engine employs a solid fuel grain (HTPB rubber) and a liquid oxidizer (nitrous-oxide), providing greater safety and lower cost than fully solid or liquid rocket engines. Scaled’s hybrid motor also employs a common bulkhead between the oxidizer tank and the motor. Tim’s co-designed the case/throat/nozzle (CTN) which reduced weight and complexity. This approach saves weight and reduces complexity. SpaceShipOne will be the first venture to launch people into space without government money or government technology. Rutan claims this will be accomplished before the 100th anniversary of the first powered flight at Kitty Hawk (17 December 2003).
SpaceShipOne’s Huntsville roots can be seen in HAL5’s Project HALO. HALO’s hybrid rockets utilize either an asphalt or HTPB solid fuel grain with liquid nitrous-oxide that is kept in an oxidizer tank separated by a common bulkhead with the motor case. In 1997, HALO air-launched a hybrid rocket from a high-altitude balloon over the Atlantic Ocean into the edge of space. That HALO mission, designated Sky-Launch 1 (SL-1), is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records 2000 (Millennium Edition) as the highest flight of an amateur rocket (36 nautical miles).
Like SpaceShipOne, HALO SL-1 used no government money, nor hardware. HAL5 had tested a rocket utilizing the same motor design a year before when it launched HALO Ground Launch-1 (GL-1) from a field in Tennessee to about 30,000 feet. In 1998, the group conducted the HALO SL-2 mission from a barge in the Gulf of Mexico. Other projects that spun off from HALO included the Balloon Launched Return Vehicle (1998) and the Cheap Access to Space (CATS) prize launch (2000). The HALO Program began in 1994 with a high-altitude balloon flight, launched from Huntsville’s Space & Rocket Center Alabama. Rocket motor testing at a site just east of Maysville in rural Madison County began early in 1995, followed by dozens of high-altitude balloon flights and hundreds of rocket motor firings. Tim Pickens was the Rocket Lead/System Designer for all of those local HALO and HALO spin-off projects. He was responsible for all mechanical and system designs.
Tim has returned to Huntsville where he continues to support Rutan’s propulsion efforts on a consultant basis. He is currently a propulsion engineer working for Plasma Processes and runs his own propulsion test company called Orion Propulsion located in Gurley, Alabama. Tim has designed and built a rocket-powered bike featured in Custom Bike magazine, and he is currently working on a “James Bond” type rocket belt. Mr. Pickens, who began his serious hybrid rocket work with the HALO Program, has since worked on such noted rocket engines as the RL-10, Fast-Track, the Space Shuttle Main Engines (SSME), and Space America’s 4000-50,000 pound thrust LOX/Kerosene engines. HALO member Glen May currently works for Scaled Composites in Mojave, California as a propulsion technician responsible for many aspects of the program.
Tim and other members of Project HALO will be testing future rocket engines and are available for press interviews on Thursday, 24 April from 7-10 PM, at his rocket workshop located at 104 Lindell Drive in Madison. For more information on Project HALO, please see web site.
HAL5 will host a public presentation by Mr. Pickens on the Huntsville connection to SpaceShipOne at the Huntsville-Madison County Public Library main auditorium on Thursday, 1 May 2003 from 7:00 to 8:30 PM. The public is invited and attendance is free. For more information, please call (256) 971-2020.
HAL5 is the Huntsville Alabama chapter of the National Space Society. It formed in 1983 as a non-profit, 501(c)(3), space educational/advocacy organization. Members share the enthusiasm that space development can stimulate our world with immeasurable benefits in the areas of education, energy, environment, industry, resources, and (ultimately) room to grow for our society. Members believe that by educating and working with the public, the government, and private industry, we can speed up the date when routine, safe, and affordable space travel is available to anyone who wants to go. Tim is helping this to become a reality.
The National Space Society, formed in 1974 by Wernher von Braun, is an independent, non-profit space advocacy organization headquartered in Washington, D.C. Its 23,000 members and over 50 chapters around the world actively promote a spacefaring civilization.
Please note that the NSS was created from the merger of two organizations formed around the same time; Werner Von Braun’s NSI mentioned above, and The L5 Society from which myself and chapters such as Huntsville L5 came from. The two merged in 1987.
Greg Allison, the leader of the HAL5 group is usually seen wandering about the yearly ISDC
There is a groundswell of anger against the Unpatriotic Act I and its’ sequel, Unpatriot II (coming soon to a Gulag near you). This very civil disobedience will soon make Herr Ashcroft’s life extremely difficult.
I was already well aware of the low esteem in which he and his slab monster laws are held in the blog arena. I quite share it if you haven’t noticed yet. Still, I was very happily unprepared for this uprising in the towns and states of America.
If your town or State has not outlawed the Patriot I Act yet, ask them why not. Show them others have done so. You don’t have to appear anti-war. You may argue we should not discard the blessings of liberty for ourselves at the same time we are bringing them to others. Defending the freedom our forefathers died for is more American than apple pie, Old Glory, mom and the 4th of July. It’s at the core of what allowed them. If we lose that unique freedom and America is “just another country”, hardly worth fighting for. Like France.
With enough effort on the part of our readers and the rest of the blogosphere, this could be the biggest rebellion against Washington since the Whiskey Rebellion in Western Pennsylvania. Unlike that one it will be impossible to put down. It is a non-violent, wide-spread effort; it is under the protective eyes of thousands of freedom loving writers like yours truly; and any attempt to kill it will make it grow.
Be a real patriot. Get out there and defy the law!
The National Space Society invites you to join fellow space enthusiasts at the International Space Development Conference, May 23-26, 2003, in San Jose, California. Buzz Aldrin will be hosting a tour of the U.S.S. Hornet on Wednesday, May 21. For more information, visit the conference website.
I’ll be there: I hope I’ll see you too!
Some years ago I read some interesting ideas about the standards of the Victorian gentleman. Superficially they were very strict. There were things gentlemen just ‘did not do’, but the superficial inflexibility hid a deep pragmatism. Sometimes one has to break standards in order to keep them. One must have ‘rough men’ on the borders and in the dangerous lands. One must sometimes compromise oneself or commit a crime against ones deepest beliefs and suffer a lifetime of remorse so that others may blissfully exist ‘within the code’.
This is why we need the Anti-war Libertarians. They are there to remind us that war is in general a bad thing; it is something which often expands state power. They provide us with an unbending code against which we must judge our actions.
Libertarians are thinking beings, not robotic ideologues. There are times when we must knowingly do things we find distasteful simply because it is the world we live in or because an action protects something we hold dear. The existence of a code, is important. Without one each new action defines a new central position which is no position at all.
We Samizdatistas are the rough men and women at the borders of Libertopia, ready and willing to sacrifice our souls that others may sleep peacefully with their more strict adherence to gentlemanly libertarian behavior.
Guess who owns Monica Lewinsky’s old flat at the Watergate?
Her former neighbors, the Doles, bought it to enlarge their own living space.
I have been out of communications for the last week or so. Due the inability of Vodafone customer service to ring FEDEX to get a check delivered, I have yet to get international service running on my mobile. Living without a mobile phone is a terrible thing. How do people exist in the dark ages Before Mobile?
I’ve also been without ethernet connection since I do not yet have an 802.11b (wireless) card. So I may sit thirsting Ancient Mariner like in a cafe filled with wireless internet chatter but unable to drink.
Although I was well connected in Connecticut, I was totally occupied with an R&D job there and barely took time to skim Fox News each night before falling into an exhausted sleep.
So that is why I have not been commenting much on the war. I had thought it might at least last long enough for me to get a few licks in before the end. That was not to be. Modern warfare, like modern culture and technology have speeded up to an almost post-human time scale. If I had gone on business for two months during WWII little would have happened. Or perhaps I should say, little in terms of modern hyperspeed warfare. A major battle might have been engaged and fought to conclusion; a invasion might have established a beach head; the Battle of Britain might have started and be reaching a peak of ferocity… but the war would not seem to have changed in its’ essence.
Contrast 1938-1945 with March-April 2003. It started as I left Belfast and its’ effectively over as I sit here in DC barely a third of the way through a series of consultancy jobs. They held a war and I’ve mostly missed it.
It’s a fast old world we live in.
Yes, I am alive and well. Reality is an omnipresent force for those of us who survive in the financially iffy feast and famine world of consultancy. Sometimes you are 3 months behind on your rent and then there are times with so much work you can’t take time to come up for air. This is one of those head down, get the money while you can times.
I’m presently in an office deep in darkest Connecticut over looking a picture postcard river scene with colonial style houses and lawns facing it. I’m working 12 hour days to finish up one project before I go on to another in Manhattan and then San Francisco. I’ll not see Belfast again until June.
I don’t really have time to write this, but I’m doing so anyway because I’ve become so fed up with the ignorance of the “professional” punditry. I obviously never went to journalism school. Perhaps thankfully. Instead I have studied technical subjects and delved deeply into history, particularly that of WWII.
Where are the pundits with a real perspective? Why not a comparison with Omaha beach at +14 days? I’ve not time to check the numbers right now, but I know as a certainty there were more Americans dead in the first hour of the landing than we have lost in the entire war in Iraq to date. There may even have been more dead getting out the door of a single landing craft but I cannot prove that without research that would be very costly in terms of billeable time.
We certainly had not reached Paris in two weeks. If you turn things around and look at the opening days of Blitzkrieg after the end of the “Phoney War” period, not even France fell in two weeks of fighting.
One might look at the time and cost in lives of Iwo Jima, a tiny and otherwise rather useless spec on the Pacific map. A thousand US Marines died in the first wave. More followed. The surf ran red with American blood, bodies and body parts filled the surf like jelly fish. It took a very long bloody fight before that dismal spec was secured. It was not a job of hours or days.
The instant a journalist asks the question “Why is it taking so long?”, I write off their intellect as nonexistant. I read the DOD press briefing transcripts and I see these moronic queries on a daily basis. I know such people are full of self-importance. I doubt they realize we are actually laughing at them.
Let us look at the reality of the war. This snippet from DefSec Rumsfeld on “This Week with George Stephanopoulis” is one of the better summaries I’ve seen of exactly how amazing this campaign has been:
He’s got one of the most powerful coalitions that could be fashioned against him. Nine days ago, they entered the country. They are now closing on Baghdad from the north, from the west, and from the south. They have total air superiority. They control the southern oil fields. They control the ports. And they’re bringing in humanitarian assistance. They have been able to capture some 4,500 prisoners. And we know that there are people fleeing from the senior regime leadership’s family. And we haven’t seen Saddam Hussein or his son in close to eight days.”
I am not going to suggest the war is easy, or that it will be over quickly. There is still Baghdad to be dealt with. There will be many months clearing pockets of resistance by people who will have nothing to lose because their remaining mortal life span in a democratic Iraq will be quite limited.
When all is said and done, this campaign is one for the history books. Never before have so few defeated so many so quickly.
I now return to professional work, still in progess.
In recent days there have been reports of ricin in France and a foiled attack in Germany.
This should be instructive to those who believe the danger will go away if we just close our eyes and believe three impossible things before breakfast.
If you are going to get hit either way you might as well stand and fight.
|
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.
|
