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]
|
So says Neil Morris, a Marine sniper with two decades experience in an interview done by Fox News. Neil adds:
“Anything the sniper does or fails to do that give his position away to the threat, snipers don’t do that, They don’t leave brass laying around, and they damn sure don’t leave tarot cards.”
Chuck Mawhinney, another professional with up to 300 battlefield kills to his credit told the interviewer the calibre is wrong:
The Washington killer has been using a .223 caliber projectile, which some have called a standard sniper bullet. But Mawhinney, who lives in Baker City, Ore., said a professional sniper would use a heavier load, at least a .30 caliber.
The one statement I have my doubts about comes from someone who should certainly know better than I. Eric Haney, one of the Delta Force founders, says 100 yard kills are no big deal:
“It’s the kind of thing that if you’ve never shot a rifle before in your life, you and I could spend 90 minutes together and you can do this,”
I think he’s exaggerating a little here. I’m only a casual shooter with no training beyond a basic Army Rifle Qual 30 years ago, but I’ve done a fair amount of “plinking” over the years prior to moving to GunFree Northern Ireland. I seriously doubt I could rack up 11 of 12 hits and 9 of 11 kills at 100 yards under stressful conditions… even with 90 minutes of Delta Force training.
The pros think it is two young men working together. One is a driver/spotter who stays calm; the other makes the kill. They might swap places.
A terrorist motivation still makes more sense to me than anything else. These “two” are equal opportunity killers. That scratches the homegrown Neo-Nutsies from the list – unless they are working for someone else. If not military professionals, the shooters are at least calm planners of reasonable markmanship. If they are both truly crazy, they are crazy in a calm and emotionless way.
One has to ask, “what is the point?” If they are psychotics it could be just racking up the score. Perhaps they are environuts out to cull the herd; or losers out for excitement and To Go Down in a final Bon Jovi Blaze of Glory.
My personal thoughts? Pro shooters or not, I think it is an al Qaeda attack. The tactical goal is to spread fear and create chaos in their enemy’s capitol. The logic of a low-investment high-return attack for al Qaeda is so strong that even if they had not considered it before, they must certainly see the possibilities now.
I said it over a year ago: we’re all soldiers now. If this is an attack, and if – at low cost – it is followed up by more such, there will be little choice for Americans but to go about daily business with a gun close to hand.
The Space Elevator concept is one I’ve always found to be of interest, but which I personally placed at least a century or more in the future. I remember many fun discussions in the early days of the sci.space netnews group; in which calculations of exponential tapers, masses and tensile strength tables were batted about gleefully. Carbon nanotubes were still in the future back then; and even in later discussions we all considered mass production of real fibres to be very far off.
Well, sometimes even those of us who have one foot in the next decade are too pessimistic. A company, High Lift Systems, has been formed to work on a near term design. Advances in production of carbon nanotubes have (mostly) solved the last basic problem. We will soon be able to build sufficient quantities of sufficiently strong material to actually build one.
Of course there is that one little detail of raising $10 billion dollars in the capital markets…
This research from Finland rates very high on the neatness scale.
It looks like it is useable anywhere with reasonably still air, so I can well imagine adverts floating in the aisles of department stores.
It’s a great Christmas gift for all those budding young tent preachers you know. They’ll get that Holy Appearance vetting them Officially for that lucrative TV contract they’ve always wanted. If your friends are of a more Shakespearean inclination, just think of the possibilities for their next production of Macbeth or Hamlet!
Ah, the future. I love this era.
There is a new generation coming up through the ranks of the US Air force, one with a steely eyed resolve much like their grandparents back in the days of WWII.
The main article is here.
While doing some research on my previous news item, I ran across this fascinating article on the WWII German nuclear weapons program.
Much of it was shrouded in mystery and misrepresentation prior to the declassification of the “Farm Hall Reports” discussed in the aforementioned link. Werner Heisenberg was caught out by statements he made in a bugged room when first told of the American bombs. It is quite apparent he was indeed committed to building a German nuclear weapon and might have if not for an egregious theoretical error.
Sometimes the gods do smile on us.
I’m sure most of you have read or heard by now about the “15 kilos” of Uranium seized by Turkish authorities. It’s turned out to be only 100 grams. I delayed writing about this due to my skepticism about the quantity. A quantity of enriched Uranium (ie high in U235) that “close” to critical mass in that small a container would be, shall we say, a bit on the warm side? …in both senses! There are ways around this if it is all pelletized (as from power plant fuel rods) and packed in neutron absorbing materials. Those, along with the lead shielding, would drive the weight up. The taxi would have been down on it’s axles!
So there were only 100g of possibly enriched Uranium and it was caught. That’s the good news. But there is a dark lining to this “silver cloud”. According to Ha’aratz:
Smugglers use Turkey’s porous eastern border to import drugs, and hundreds of thousands of migrants each year illegally cross the rugged frontier on their way to more affluent European Union nations.
Police in Istanbul seized more than one kg of weapons-grade uranium last November that had been smuggled into Turkey from an east European state. The smugglers were detained after attempting to sell the material to undercover police officers.
Note what Ha’aretz leaves you to infer for yourself. We all know how successful attempts to stop drug smuggling have been. About all you can do with drug seizure data is infer an order of magnitude more was not caught. Given the value of fissionable material and the actual quantities seized in Turkey alone in the last year…
Folks, we have a problem.
Armadillo Aerospace has finally let one of it’s team fly on their testbed. Although the flight was a tethered one of short duration and trivial height, it encompassed all the dangerous bits of engine startup, liftoff, hover, setdown and engine shutdown. Major kudos are due to John Carmack and his team! You can read more and find the video here.
In John’s own words:
We finally let someone ride on one of our landers. Only a few seconds in the air, but still pretty damn cool!
If the name John Carmack sounds familiar… it’s probably because it is. He is a founder of Id Software and the author of all those classic state-of-the-art pushing games from Castle Wolfenstein through Quake Arena and beyond.
- Would you be willing to tell Miss Piggy she’s unclean?
- What would we do with all the one handed politicians?
- The Budweiser Chameleon. So you think The Birds were nasty?
- We’ve only got virgins for Martyr’s age 8 and under.
- It’s impolite here to throw rocks when someone asks to get stoned.
- Pancakes and a side of camel fat just doesn’t have that ring to it.
- It won’t help crime because toilet paper works in either hand.
- Ham and cheese sandwiches beat goats milk for lunch hands down.
- Bob Evans would sue for loss of livelihood.
- Playboy Magazine just wouldn’t be the same with Burqah gatefolds.
I’ve just received email notice of the death of Dr. Robert L. Forward. He’s known to some for the wonderful “hardest of the hard” Science Fiction he wrote; to others for his cutting edge work in physics and propulsion systems; and to still others for his loud vests, boyish exuberance, smile and tossled white hair. At any conference his gesticulating presence around the bar of the hospitality suite was certain. He carried all around him on a race through one stunningly creative idea after another.
I last talked to Bob in May when he was of enormous help as I put together a conference track on Novel Propulsion Systems. “Enormous help” from Bob was the rule, not the exception. He’s been of assistance to me so many times over the twenty years in which I have had the good fortune to know him I would be filling pages if I were to itemize.
All I can say is, we’ll miss you Bob. Intellects and personalities wrapped up with warmth and caring like yours are more than few and far between: they are nearly non-existant.
Bob Forward at 1992 National Space Society
conference in Washington, DC. (photo: D. Amon)
Kay Pirello from the Carla Howell team has asked for assistance from all and sundry:
NECN informed us that, although WPI invited Carla Howell to be in the gubernatorial debate on October 1st, and although she accepted their invitation, the media consortium covering the debate is now waffling and claiming the decision is up in the air.
Please contact the below people at the bottom of this email ASAP and urge them to stand by WPI’s ecision to include Carla Howell.
Below is a copy of the letter Carla Howell faxed to each of them earlier today.
If they exclude Carla Howell from this debate it will cause Carla Howell for Governor and Carla owell’s Ballot Question 1 grave damages.
Please CALL RIGHT NOW to URGE them to include Carla Howell!
Then any you can’t reach, please email your own personal message to them.
Thank you!
You might want to tell them you read it on a weblog based in Belfast, Northern Ireland – the following being Boston media and all!
→ Continue reading: Urgent! Carla Howell needs you to Phone and Email Right Now!
Carla Howell seems to have made a major breakthrough. She will be in the Massachusetts Governor’s Debate. It’s going to be awfully hard to ignore her after this (from her press release):
“Carla Howell is in the October 1 Governor’s Debate. ABC, CBS, NBC, and New England Cable News TV. The Boston Globe. The Boston Herald. The Worcester Telegram & Gazette. It will be simulcast on the internet. Moderated by CNN’s Judy Woodruff. Shannon O’Brien, the Democratic nominee for Governor, and Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee for Governor, will both debate Carla Howell face-to-face.”
After she’s done with Boston Tea Party II, could we talk her into throwing one over here too?
I can’t comment on whether or how guilty or dangerous the alleged terrorist ring is, but some statements, such as the following from Fox News just make me laugh:
Hochul said other evidence found at al-Bakri’s home in Lackawanna included a rifle, a telescopic sight, and a cassette tape that “asks Allah to give Jews and their enablers (U.S.) a black day.”
Now please tell me why finding a rifle and a sight in a house in Pennsylvania is unusual? I grew up in a small town in Western PA, and it would have been closer to news if they entered a random house and didn’t find an entire cabinet full of rifles, shotguns, ammunition and assorted sights and accessories.
It just makes you cringe to read this kind of idiocy.
Erratum: Lackawanna is across the border in New York state, not in Pennsylvania.
|
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.
|
