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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I ran across this article from my old home city of Pittsburgh. A local unit was called to active duty in May. I was of course interested because the unit is based near my home town of Coraopolis, But I’m sure anyone should see the implications. A large medical unit was called up and sent off “somewhere”.
I would take it as an expectation of some serious ground combat, and if I were to make a really good stab at where they are going I’d put southern Turkey (by a wide margin) on the top of the list and northern Saudi Arabia as the number two.
I think September 11th would be a lovely day to hang Saddam, don’t you?
It has taken me nearly a year to “get around to” a small task. Reading the list of the dead from the opening shot of the war. It was not a pleasant thing to do. At each scroll I expected to see some name jump out at me.
None did.
Oh, there was one possible, a person with the same name and age as someone I went to Coraopolis High School with. But it is not likely he’d have been in financial services in New York and there was no hit on the name when I searched the old home town.
It doesn’t mean there weren’t any people I knew in the list. I just didn’t spot any. You can’t ever know, Not really. Old girlfriends get married and change their names; people vanish from a “crowd” and a time. Names and faces become indistinct with time. I may yet hear sad news at some gathering of old friends,.but at least the names I most worried about were not there.
My biggest fear was assuaged by a hole in the list of the dead from the New York Fire Department. A hole where a name I knew wasn’t to be found.
It is good to know I will listen and enjoy the craic with Tony DeMarco again as he fiddles away at his weekly Session at Paddy Reilly’s.
I think I’ll just give him a hug next time over.
While googling for the previous posting I ran across a pair of articles which left me open jawed. The first of them should be informative to many as to why Americans think Europeans dislike Americans for their middle class culture. While the reality is euro-trash culture is just as middle class as that of the US, the Continental Elites are, well, more Elite. “People who matter” actually listen to them and nod in sage agreement when they speak.
But before anyone over there gets their back too straignt and proud, read this one. You’ve got your own Holier Than Thou academics, every bit as bad as their euro-brethren.
It’s just that you don’t pay them no never mind.
I was quite pleased to read New Yorkers have as much disdain for the plans as I have.
I don’t know about you, but I found all six of the plans cowardly and inward looking. I was really rather disgusted – and offended – by them. The NY I came to know, while living in the East Village and working in Midtown, would build them bigger and better than they were. Personally I kind of liked the idea of one wag: four tall buildings. One slightly taller… yep, an upraised finger to those fuckers.
Yeah, that’s the ticket!
Thanks to Ain’t No Bad Dude Brian Linse for pointing me to this Matt Welch piece at TechCentralStation. Like Matt, I also remember that fascinating Red/Blue November 2000 county by county election map. However as a Libertarian (colour as yet unassigned) I had a relatively neutral perspective on it, whiich is perhaps why a certain feature absolutely jumped out and screamed at me.
The election was not Republican vs Democrat. It was City Folk vs Country Folk. The only exception to his was the democractic strip up the southern Mississippi, an area inhabited by the descendents of black sharecroppers.
The Democrats should be asking themselves: “Why do Country Folk hate us?” Likewise and reversely the Republicans.
I wonder if the divide is bridgeable? City folk may have simply drifted too far into the Disney version of the land and nature to be able to communicate with those who grew up with the real thing.
Perhaps the crossing over effect Matt speaks of was simply the reaction to common danger by un-common people. Perhaps blogging will keep at least a semblance of debate going, but I think the differences run deeper than he fears.
As I’ve often said before, my own political journey began to the left of the Nolan chart. One of the reasons it did not end there was the forward into the past mentaility I ran across time and again. The problem is, there are important issues at stake in the United States, issues with far more import than the assinine Politically Correct Hate Me I Was Born Here mentality.
Some of the very foundations of freedom are under threat. Rather than go into details, I suggest you read and act on these two: Lessig and Stallman and UCITA.
My message to the Left: GET OFF YOUR FRIGGIN’ ARSES AND JOIN THE 21ST CENTURY BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE!
I have read Perry’s link to the checkered history of the UPA with great interest (see previous Samizdata.net article). There is much students of the period miss simply because of the vastness of the Eastern Front and the greater perceived relevance to our own history of the Western.
Most striking in the Weisenthal Centre’s brief history of the hatreds, treacheries and double-dealings of the period and area is how well it is brought to life in the guise of real people in Harry Turtledove’s wonderful alternate history series, “World War“. I won’t spoil any of it for those who have not read the books, other than to say he puts human faces and motives to the many players of that vast historical drama of the twentieth century.
I highly recommend the books to anyone and particularly to those interested in WWII. Not for the history itself – it is an alternate reality – but to get inside the heads of the people behind the facts.
No one is a monster in their own mind – and sometimes not even in their own time.
During a phone conversation the other night I commented to Perry on the pointlessness of Apple’s decision to charge for formerly free email accounts. We’d both read an item sent us by a friend, and Perry was wondering if perhaps this is a sign of a shift to fees in many areas of the internet. Today he pointed me to this Dodgeblog item and gave my arm a severe virtual twisting in hopes I’d pass my comments on to the world.
It’s quite simple actually. Apple and others are battling for a market in email hosting just as it is about to go the way of horseshoes and buggy whips. This is perhaps more apparent to me than it would be to most since I do consultancy to data centres. My question to Perry, and to anyone else is “In a world where broadband into the home is common, why on earth would anyone leave their email hosting in the hands of a distant large corporation?” Or even a nearby small one for that matter!
It really hasn’t sunk in to the heads of most people yet that broadband to the home means much more than the opening of a huge market of passive consumers. It’s many to many communication, not one to many like television, radio and the movies. The internet is not just a new mass media. It is a total bypass of central control.
For a few hundred quid today and probably less tomorrow, I can put in a Linux firewall; I can run my own email and web hosting for my family photos from home; I can connect with my laptop from anywhere in the world through a secure encrypted virtual tunnel. All with trusted, vetted, peer-reviewed open source applications.
So I ask again. Why exactly should anyone care if companies start charging for email hosting? It will just drive the market towards home internet appliances. In a very few years the rest of you will be recieveing your PGP encrypted email over SSL connections into your own secure server where it is stored on an encrypted disk.
It’s not science fiction. A lot of us are already there.
Carla Howell reports they are well ahead of expectations at this early date in the campaign for the rollback of Massachussetts income tax. According to the July 15th Boston Herald, polls already show 37% support for the ballot initiative. There has been virtually no reporting of the measure in the Boston papers to this point, so this level of support before the proposed TV advertising campaign is nothng short of stunning.
Get your warpaint and feathers ready, me lads!
If Carla and Co are reading, may I humbly suggest the Green Dragon for a pint of Guinness? It’s where the Sons Of Liberty met (or on the site thereof) . A very good place from which to begin the Second Boston Tea Party! The management are quite nice. It was our HQ while I was in Boston with an Irish band. They let us stash our gear in their basement.
Dee Moore and Kevin Ryan in front of the Green Dragon with myself behind the camera, Aug 24, 1994 (photo D.Amon)
NASA Glenn has selected General Electric Aircraft Engines (Evendale, Ohio) for a Revolutionary Turbine accelerator (RTA) demonstrator as part of the Revolutionary Aerospace Engine Research contract given to GE in 2001.
Propulsion is perhaps the major driver in the world of aerospace. If the demonstrator project succeeds in pushing turbine propulsion based systems up to Mach 4, it will be a major step toward airline style access to space.
While I’d rather see NASA get out of the way, I must in all honesty commend this type of work. If they are going to spend our money at all, they should at least be applying it to the commercially high value high-risk research which was their original remit as NACA.
I was reading Aeroplane over what might charitably be called “lunch”. Some crisps and a cup at the approximate time of a normal lunch… but this is just making a short story long.
Castle Bromwich is well known in aviation circles. It’s where a large number of Spitfires and Lancasters were built (for the non-aviation minded, that places it in World War II). Each airplane had to be taken up and run through some rough testing before being handed over to the ATA (the men and women who delivered aircraft to the RAF bases). The test pilots were there to ensure manufactruing mistakes were found at the plant and not in battle.
Now Castle Bromwich had miserable weather, lots of fog, a rather short runway that was half paved and half grass. I remembered reading much of that before. What I didn’t know was the interesting bit about the approach. You see, there was a sewage treatment plant just before the threshold.
It really has to be asked. Did the test pilots at Castle Bromwich originate the phrase…. “landing us in the shit”???
I couldn’t resist it.
57 years ago today a mushroom bloomed in the desert at Alamorgordo, New Mexico.
That was a very long time ago. It’s almost high school science project level technology today.
From a point in the far future the 21st century may well be seen as the beginning of the end of dense “target rich” population centers.
 
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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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