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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After watching this I just had to do a hatchet job on an old standard:
500 Pounds
If you miss the plane I’m on,
I will know that you are gone.
Cause I’ve dropped 500 pounds upon your head.
Five hundred pounds, Five hundred pounds,
Five hundred pounds, Five hundred pounds,
Cause I’ve dropped 500 pounds upon your head.
Lord it’s one, Lord it’s two,
Lord it’s three and Lord it’s four,
Lord it’s five hundred pounds upon your head.
Not a shirt on your back,
Not a penny left intact.
Oh, I will blow your arse to hell this-away
This-a way, this-a way,
This-a way, this-a way,
Oh, I will blow your arse to hell this-away
If you miss the plane I’m on,
I will know that you are gone.
Cause I’ve dropped 500 pounds upon your head.
Five hundred pounds, Five hundred pounds,
Five hundred pounds, Five hundred pounds,
Cause I’ve dropped 500 pounds upon your head.
A powerful tornado has swept through the city of Birmingham in the West Midlands.
The twister struck earlier today, cutting a swathe of devastation through the districts of Kings Heath, Moseley, Quinton, Balsall Heath and Sparkbrook.
Mercifully, there are no reports of any fatalities but initial estimates put the cost of the damage as high as £7.50.
The Sage of Edmonton has been listening to the cricket, and has stumbled on Australia’s dirty little secret:
The Australian networks are picking up the BBC feed, so the network observes a strict one-Brit one-Aussie rule at all times in the booth. This leads to a lot of barbed, culturally volatile exchanges covered by a transparent shellac of collegiality. The English are generally poor at hiding their commingled fascination and horror at the gusto and glowing health of the Australians. The Aussies, for their part, maintain a suitable Zarathustran superciliousness–but it sure seems like homo australis is awfully vulnerable to the verbal stiletto that every Englishman above the age of four carries in his boot. Every time the various English broadcasters start to wax acerbic, their Australian colleagues become flustered and try changing the subject to the events on the field (as well they might, since their squad is making England’s cricketers look more like Scotland’s). Has any attention been paid to the Australian sense of humour, or absence thereof? They seem to mostly export soap and pop stars to the wider world while their British and Canadian brethren airlift comedians. It’s not a good sign when your most sophisticated national ironist is Dame Edna Everage.
Most Australians will deny it, but Colby Cosh is right on the money. In my own case, I never had a chance; not only am I Australian, but I am descended from Germans. I could not tell a funny joke to win the Ashes.
This is not to say that Australians do not have a sense of humour. Comedy is a big thing here, but Australian humour does not translate well, being full of allusions that only the locals understand. And I sadly suspect, the quality is not that good either.
Why is it so? Or is it obvious, and, me being Australian, I missed the punchline?
Could this be linked to anything?
Plans by an alliance of rightwing extremists and football hooligans to exact “revenge” on Muslims after last week’s bomb attacks are being monitored by police.
The Guardian has learned that extremists are keen to cause widespread fear and injury with attacks on mosques and high-profile “anti-Muslim” events in the capital.
And so another unfortunate spoke is added to the growing cycle of violence. But beneath the predictable roar of indignant outcry, it behoves us all to take the time and trouble to examine the plight of the native British working-classes; a plight which is all too often trodden underfoot in the wholesale rush to judgement.
Over the last few decades, the British working-classes have had to endure the indignity of watching their homelands colonised by foreign settlers, while oppressive “zero-tolerance” policing and so-called ‘anti-social behaviour orders’ have made them virtual prisoners in the few, dwindling communities that remain to them. At the same time, their jobs have been exported abroad, while the trade unions that used to promote their interests have been politically neutered. Thus despised, impoverished and persecuted, is it any wonder that some of their activists have taken it into their hands to strike back?
Nor should it be forgotten that they have no guns, no helicopters, no batons, no dogs, no infra-red detectors, no CS gas sprays, no tazers or other quasi-military means of defending themselves. Instead, they are forced to use what few pitiful resources they do have in a despairing bid to restore some dignity to their lives.
Of course, violence should not be condoned because it actually further damages the patriotic cause. But the victims of that violence would learn a great deal from an honest reflection of what role they may have played in driving these patriotic campaigners to such desperate measures.
Few, it seems, are prepared to face up to the simple truth, let alone articulate it. Instead, there is likely to be a chorus of demand for more security measures such as surveillance cameras, ID cards and oppressive police powers, all of which will merely add fuel to the fires that rage within the activists, reinforce their sense of hopelessness and humiliation and virtually guarantee further patriotic operations in the future.
We can all agree that the violence has to stop but in order to achieve that end we must urgently and sincerely address the legitimate grievances of the patriotic community.
“A libertarian is a conservative with an acknowledged vice, like say, a teenage girlfriend.”
The as-ever brilliant P.J. O’Rourke (hat tip Catallarchy)
… hears that his friend, an economist, is in Addenbrooks [in the US version of this joke, in Mount Auburn] with a badly broken leg, and goes to visit.
Physicist: What happened?
Economist: I had just stepped off the balcony, and wham! — I fell and broke my leg.
Physicist: You stepped… off… the balcony? What on earth for?
Economist: How was I to know there would be gravity failure?
This story raised a dry smile.
Sorry but this was too funny to leave languishing in the comments section. For our non-UK readers, the Eurostar train currently terminates at the railway station in London rejopicing in the name of Waterloo:
Now that our relationship with France has reverted to its traditional millennium-long condition, can we be assured that before the Channel Tunnel Rail Link is finally completed in a year or two, the Eurostar London terminus at St Pancras will be renamed to align it more closely politically, historically and emotionally with the name of the present terminus south of the river?
Trafalgar, Salamanca, Vittoria, Blenheim, Crecy or Agincourt are just a few of the most obvious candidates history has so bountifully provided us with. A rather more modern choice, from 1940, might be Mers-el-Kebir…
Would not the choice of name make a particularly fine subject for a referendum?
Heh! I vote for Mers-el-Kebir as we can probably fool the multi-cultis into thinking we are being ‘culturally inclusive’ by choosing a non-European name!
This gem is of unknown true provenance but I found it amongst the Freepers:
If you consider that there have been an average of 160,000 troops in the Iraqi theater during the last 22 months, that gives a firearm death ratio of 60 per 100,000.
The firearm death ratio in DC is 80.6 per 100,000. That means that you are more likely to be shot and killed in our Nation’s Capitol, which has some of the strictest gun control laws in the nation, than you are in Iraq.
Conclusion: We should immediately pull out of … WASHINGTON, DC!
Sounds like an excellent strategy to me.
This arrived in my inbox via the Crikey email
A major research institution has just announced the discovery of the heaviest element yet known to science. The new element has been named ‘’Governmentium’.
Governmentium has one neutron, 12 assistant neutrons, 75 deputy neutrons, and 224 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312. These 312 particles are held together by forces called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called peons.
Since Governmentium has no electrons, it is inert. However, it can be detected, as it impedes every reaction with which it comes into contact.
A minute amount of Governmentium causes one reaction to take over four days to complete, when it would normally take less than a second.
Governmentium has a normal half-life of four years; it does not decay, but instead undergoes a reorganisation in which a portion of the assistant neutrons and deputy neutrons exchange places.
In fact, Governmentium’s mass will actually increase over time, since each re-organisation will cause more morons to become neutrons, forming isodopes.
This characteristic of moron-promotion leads some scientists to believe that Governmentium is formed whenever morons reach a certain concentration. This hypothetical quantity is referred to as ‘Critical Morass’.
When catalysed with money, Governmentium becomes Administratium, an element which radiates just as much energy, since it has 1/2 as many peons but twice as many morons.
Selected research on bread:
More than 98 percent of convicted felons are bread users.
Fully HALF of all children who grow up in bread-consuming households score below average on standardized tests.
In the 18th century, when virtually all bread was baked in the home, the average life expectancy was less than 50 years; infant mortality rates were unacceptably high; many women died in childbirth; and diseases such as typhoid, yellow fever, and influenza ravaged whole nations.
More than 90 percent of violent crimes are committed within 24 hours of eating bread.
Primitive tribal societies that have no bread exhibit a low incidence of cancer, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s disease, and osteoporosis.
Newborn babies can choke on bread.
Most American bread eaters are utterly unable to distinguish between significant scientific fact and meaningless statistical babbling.
Providing all the scientific support any nanny-stater will need to implement controls.
Cricket will be suspended indefinitely at Albion College from now on, in order to preserve the playing fields, it has been announced.
Head Boy, Mr ARP Blair said: “The groundsman has explained to me that it is vital to maintain the cricket square and outfield that have nurtured Albion’s spirit of fair play for nearly 300 years that we stop cricket immediately. Of course we must do what the groundsman says. His staff have have had great difficulties arising from boys running up and down on the pitch and using bats and balls in a most irresponsible manner. By stopping play indefinitely, he has explained, the mystery of the soil and their special gardening techniques (which he will explain to boys sitting the Rural Sciences exam), will allow them to keep the playing surfaces safe from any boys who might tear up the grass.
“We have to trust the groundsman in this. He, after all, knows more about fields than any number of cricketers. I’ve heard that some people are saying he only wants this so that he can spend more time drinking in the pavilion, and that I’m only supporting him to curry favour with those boys who have never seen the point of games or latin and would like this to be an agricultural college. Anybody saying such things is a traitor to the school’s tradition, and if I find out who they are they will be very severely dealt with.”
[Apologies to overseas readers for over-British allusions. Glossary available on request]
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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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