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Our hosting company has been under sustained DOS attacks from some worthless scrotes over the last couple days and if you have been finding it hard to reach samizdata.net, that is why.

It is also why there has been a low volume of posts here as we have frequently been unable to access our blog's 'back-end'. The good folks at Hosting Matters have been doing their best to keep things operational under difficult circumstances.

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A few weeks ago when we culled the so-called race realists (neo-fascist racists) that were camping in Samizdata.net's comment section, it became clear to me that if you let ill mannered loud mouths use your venue to try and shout down discourse and endlessly turn unrelated topics to their pet thesis, all you do is attract more ill mannered loud mouths who will do the same.

Everyone has their techy days in the comment section but when a person makes a habit of being obnoxious and immune to rational argument, I see no reason to indulge them or tolerate them. This is not a forum and this is not a chat room, it is a blog, which is quite different. Many blogs do not even have comment sections.

When you open your house to visitors, you do not give up the right to kick people out if they start insulting other guests and spray painting their opinions on the wall. Of course some people would say, "Oh but that is censorship if you stop them". Er, no, it is just maintaining control over what is and is not acceptable on your private property... but of course some people, the sort that I am now far quicker to ban, do not actually believe in private property (not when you pin them down), and often cannot see that censorship by the state of private media channels and editorial control over a private media channel (such as a blog, for example) are materially different things. But then to someone who thinks all interaction should be political (the usual term used is 'democratic' these days), such distinctions make little difference to them. I am not referring here to specific people but rather the general class from which our 'problem commenters' tend to spring.

Some cannot see that they are not being 'censored' because of whatever their views are, any more than a man who gets on a table in a restaurant, drops his draws and starts calling for the darkies to be thrown out of Britain or for the middle class to have their homes confiscated is being 'censored' when he gets thrown out by a bouncer for being an jackass.

If I have any regrets it is that I have been too indulgent of endlessly poorly argued and often off topic drivel posted by a small minority of serial commenters in the past. I have no objection to vocal dissent from the 'Samizdata.net world view' (whatever that is), I just object to a constant stream of unsupported contentions delivered by megaphone that makes no attempt to actually engage in discourse. We have lots of dissenters who comment here regularly that I would not dream of banning.

So yes, there is a new hard line. Trolls and blogroaches will not be indulged and will be ejected rather swifter in future.

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On behalf of the Samizdata Team, it gives me great pride and pleasure to announce a major change to our readers.

For some days now we have been working feverishly behind the scenes to smooth the path of the imminent merger between Samizdata and the Noam Chomsky Blog.

As I am sure you can all appreciate, this is not just a time of thrilling change but it is also a supremely fitting culmination of all the hard work and endeavour we have put in to this blog. That someone as august, as visionary and brilliant as Professor Chomsky should see fit to share a platform with us, honours us all in a way to profound and moving for me to express with mere words.

This is not merely a collaborative effort. It is a great coming together of like hearts and like minds in a grand joint push to change the world. We know that you, our readers, must be every bit as excited by the prospect as we are.

The newly-merged blog, called Noamizdata will be launched very shortly, so get ready to update your 'Favourites' list. We regret that this site will be down for a short period while the changeover is effected but we are working tirelessly to ensure that the interruption to your regular service is kept to a bare minimum.

Samizdata and Chomsky together will be a unstoppable force. The future starts now.

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We may be off the air for a short time due to some maintenance issues. Back soon!

Update: Well that was rather painless. Our downtime was hardly a blink

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We were off the air for a short while today because Hosting Matters were moving their servers into a security cage.

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Sorry about the brief but painful service outage some of you make have experienced. Our hosting server had a spot of dispepsia but the good folks at Hosting Matters got us up and running again in no time.

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Our most splendid Frogman has added another wallpaper to the Samizdata.net wallpaper page (scroll down to the bottom of the page). Check them out!

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We now have several very cool Samizdata.net wallpapers for your computer desktop, the link to which can be permanently found in our sidebar under 'network'!

More illuminated graphic splendours from the Dissident Frogman!

The mighty Frogman is on a roll... he has added yet another wallpaper to the selection!

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We are still stamping on bugs which a minority of people have reported due to the major Samizdata.net re-design.

Some of the 'hard to reproduce' bugs people have reported in some OS/browser combinations are proving a tad challenging to hunt down but we are still persevering.

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I last logged out leaving the Samizdata just as I like it. There was a place for everything and everything was in its place. Yes, it may have been a bit shambolic and démodé but it was comforting and familiar like an old friend or a favourite armchair.

Only look at what has happened! I turn my back for a few hours and some anally-retentive busybodies have gone and called in the Feng Shui consultants. Now my loveable, historical old Blog has been has been consigned to the scrap heap and replaced with this ultra-hi-tech, cutting-edge, state-of-the-art thingy which they are probably going to tell me has been conceived for 'balance' or 'harmony' or 'enhanced Chi' or something.

And as if that act of wanton cultural vandalism was not enough they have also furnished me with a new-fangled set of coding instructions with 'stylesheets' and 'javascript' and 'xhtml' this and 'attribute' that. The whole thing reads like stereo-assembly instructions. How is this old dog supposed to learn all these new tricks? It took me look enough to programme me the first time round. They will doubtless have to ship me off to the manufacturer now to be re-chipped and re-booted.

Or maybe they are planning to give me a make-over. Yes, I bet they are. After all age and experience counts for nothing these days. It's all about image, image, image and daresay I am no longer regarded as sufficiently 'happening' anymore. I can see myself now, being prodded and poked around by a squadron of invidious design-gurus ("Dahhling, that haircut is just sooooo 2003").

I would write a letter of complaint to these soulless technocrats but what good would it do? Besides they have all probably swanned off to some fashionable Islington eatery where they are quaffing down the polenta with rocket salad and feeling very smug about being so 'cool' and a la mode.

Bah! It's all humbug.

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As our regular readers will notice, Samizdata.net has had a major re-design and functional upgrade. The old site was great but things moves on and it was time for an upgrade. Take a moment to examine all the new options and links! Also see the revamped domain page and blogging glossary!

We would like to thanks thank the Dissident Frogman for his really great work.

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Samizdata.net may be unavailable for a while today and tomorrow as we work to upgrade our software. Also we will be bring you some interesting... changes

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Hosting Matters was having some 'server issues' which caused Samizdata.net to be briefly unavailable. We are also having other technical problems but expect to be fully operational again shortly.

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Due to a server hickup, Samizdata.net was feeling poorly... we now return you to your regular programming.

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The server upon which we are hosted was a bit dyspetic for about an hour today... but it is feeling much better now after it was burped (rebooted) by our excellent chums at Hosting Matters, who really are the worlds best hosting company!

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I am about to install some bot-killing software, so if comments happen to break for awhile or the site rolls over with its itty bitty paws flailing in the air, you will know why...

Update: Samizdata.net comments will now require you to enter a security code that you copy off a graphic that will appear in the comment pop-up window. This should prevent spam-bots from auto-posting their garbage all over the blog.

Also, we have updated some code to stop spammers harvesting the e-mail addresses of commenters as well.

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Ou readers may have noticed that the Samizdata was down for a few hours today. It appears that the cause was sustained DOS attack directed to our hosting company Hosting Matters.

Little Green Footballs was also affected and has further details.

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Social individualists of the world unite!
You have nothing to lose but your chains
and a whole world to win!

Although intended as a humorous meme-hack, the statement is also quite clearly true. The irony is that for individuals to preserve their individuality, they must unite with others to fight the collectivist political pressures that would deny that we are moral free agents and make us so much less than we are: to fight involuntary collectivism we must voluntarily act collectively.

And so that is why I set up Samizdata.net and lured others to dive into the blogosphere with me head first.

It was my attempt to give a platform to shout out to the world for like-minded individuals who rejected the intrusive force backed collectivist view of the world. We are not really trying to 'convert' people, though that would be nice, rather we are trying to change people's meta-context and let the ideology take care of itself. That is our 'mission statement' if you like.

A meta-context is a person's frames of reference through which they interpret the world around them. It is not an ideology or a political 'ism' or even a philosophy... it is 'just' a series of axioms and 'givens' that colour and flavour how you think about things and come to understand them via a set of critical or emotional preferences and underlying assumptions. We all have a personal meta-context.

For example, it is one of the reasons that although I have written many articles on Samizdata.net about the issue of private ownership of firearms in the USA, I very rarely discuss the Second Amendment. Why? Because an individualist meta-context does not have rights as something which are dependent on The State.

The Second Amendment of the US Bill of Rights is a legal artifice, but it is not the source or reason that people should be able to own weapons as a matter not of privilege but by right. In fact, no state and its laws is the source of any right whatsoever: rights are objectively yours to begin with and are not given to you by anyone. Thus I will never argue an American has the right to own a gun because 'it says so in the Second Amendment' because they would have a right to do so even if it said nothing of the sort.

Yet that is not to say I think the Second Amendment is a bad idea, just that it is nothing more than a useful profane tool to secure an objective right, not a source of rights. To me as an individualist, I see do not see the state as central to my life or quite frankly to civil society... as I am not a fully convinced anarchist I do see some role for limited government in securing the rights of individuals, but just as an adjunct to far more important the networks that are primarily social rather than political.

And so if we are trying to change people's meta-context to include more individualist and less collectivist frames of reference, then it behoves us to use phrases which assist in this process rather than those which are loaded with 'trigger words' that may well get our views unhelpfully pigeonholed in places that does not really reflect where we are coming from. Now I certainly regard myself as a libertarian of the minarchist flavour... what is sometimes called a 'Classical Liberal'. However the term 'libertarian' is increasingly loaded with meanings that generate more heat than light, and thus I have started using the term 'social individualist' rather than 'libertarian in Samizdata.net's introduction in the sidebar. We have not changed... certainly I have not... and I intend to continue arguing that the term 'libertarian' can only be used correctly to describe people who promote the individual liberty to chose how you interact with the world via social interaction rather than force backed political interaction. Just as Living Marxism changed its name to Spiked in order to shed the 'baggage' of the term 'Marxism' without actually changing a thing ideologically, we started life as 'Libertarian Samizdata' back in our early days on-line and then just became Samizdata.net in order to better reach beyond the worthy true believers. We are no longer Libertarian Samizdata but our thinking is really no different to when we started.

Yet if the term 'libertarian' gets in the way of what we are trying to do, it is time to start de-emphasising it. I am still a member of the executive committee of the London based Libertarian Alliance and I still regard myself as a pukka libertarian. But a more accurate description of my views than just the broad church of 'libertarianism' would be that I reject collectivist views of the world as utterly falsified, but at the same time I do not regard individuals as atomised objects existing in splendid isolation. Unless you live alone in a log cabin in the middle of Canada subsisting on nuts and moose meat, you are an individual within a social environment: a civil society. And it is the extent to which you can freely act within civil society as an individual pursuing self-defined ends by right, without political coercion or permission, that is the measure of whether you are free or not.

Additionally, I have long regarded socialism as the most ironic use of language in the history of mankind, given that it means to replace social interaction with entirely political interaction. It is time to reclaim the word social and reject the newspeak inversion of it into meaninglessness.

And it is addressing those issues that make this a social individualist weblog.

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Last night Samizdata.net's illustrious blog suddenly went tits-up for a while. For some reason half of the main index template just... disappeared.

The blog had been exhibiting some odd behaviour (and I am not referring to the writing style of Gabriel Syme) and so I started poking around inside to see what was amiss.

So when the site went splat a few minutes after I started looking around, I thought I had accidentally screwed the pooch in some fit of mouse-wielding madness as I noticed a huge chunk of the main index was just...gone

But I soon realised that the part of the template which vanished into hyperspace was nowhere near where I was messing around (and in any case, all I did was remove a spurious line break). Has anyone out there even had this sort of thing happen to them in Moveable Type?

We may have lost a few sidebar links, so if you notice your blog has been de-linked, please let us know and we will reinstate it. And yes, I will be backing up far more often in future!!!

Oh, and by the way... let me extol the greatness of the Queen of the Goddamned Internet, Stacy Tabb who de-lobotomised our belovéd blog in record time

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The sharp eyed and attentive amongst you may have spotted the funky monkey that has appeared in the 'free market' section of our sidebar... we have acquired a sponsor!

But not just any sponsor.

The Gold Casino is an off-shore internet casino (obviously) in the most literal sense of the term. It is located on a server in the Principality of Sealand, a fully independent micro-state off the shore of Great Britain. Don't like the state? Go set up your own.

No I am not joking!

Well I did say micro-state, didn't I?

So take a peak at what our sponsor is offering by poking the funky monkey and check out their message via the link underneath the sidebar graphic. I assure you it is far more interesting that the usual marketing blather one is usually confronted with... you will see why we find them so ideologically agreeable!

It adds a whole new nuance to the term 'off-shore business'

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We started off on Samizdata.net with a sitemeter.com tracker... alas the java version which tracks referrals refused to work when we upgraded our site to Movable Type, so we added a Extreme tracker. That too is doing strange things now since our latest Movable Type upgrade (all referrals are being recorded as coming from our MT installation rather than the actual referral page) and as I have never, not once, got a reply from their tech support people no matter how often I send them messages (and I have their premium paid-for version), I am looking for recommendations regarding:

1. What might be causing our problem with the Extreme's tracker?
   
2. And is the java version of sitemeter's premium counter likely to work with MT 2.6x?
   
3. Are there any better premium trackers out there as I hate to keep paying for crap service from Extreme?

Any suggestions?

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Our RDF & XML syndication feeds were buggered up...

...and now they are not. Hurrah

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We Samizdatistas are in the blogging business for the long haul and so it is very gratifying indeed to be involved with a highly a successful blog... we may not be in the same league popularity wise as Instapundit or Andrew Sullivan but we are nevertheless a significant fixture in the Blogosphere.

However as our hit rate steadily creeps upward, so do our bandwidth costs. As a result, Samizdata.net has finally succumbed to the economic facts of life and our sidebar now has buttons which give our truly global readership the option to send us a donation via PayPal to help defray our mounting bandwidth expenses.

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Due to a DNS/IP cock up, we have been off the air for a while... a shout goes out to the support staff at Hosting Matters for solving the problem with lightning speed when I actually told them what they needed to know.

Hosting Matters are simply the best, so give them your spondulies and host your site with them!

They rock

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As our regular readers will have noticed, we were blown off our server by the bandwidth spike caused by the response to Gabriel Syme's article on Wednesday.

We have just moved to Hosting Matters, and thus hopefully such traumatic 'black out' events will be a thing of the past from now on!

Glenn Reynolds has blown up more servers that Al Qaeda!

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We are having various server problems which are making it difficult for us to post articles. It also seems to be causing error messages when people try to leave comments.

Unfortunately the resolution of these difficulties may take a while due to circumstances beyond our control.

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We may be moving servers as soon as tonight (or if not, hopefully tomorrow), so we may have a few hiccups in Samizdata.net availability.

Also, our comments seem to be having a severe case of deja vu (multiple entries) at the moment. As we are bit server lagged, do not keep pressing 'Post' when adding comments or we will get your pearls of wisdom again...and again...and again.

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As we hope to be moving to a new server some time soon (hopefully very soon), Samizdata.net may be unavailable for a short time during the DNS switch over.

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We have belatedly started adding additional links to a great many interesting blogs in the Samizdata.net sidebar (31 added so far today). More will be added later tonight as well as culling a few inactive ones.

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As you may have noticed, Samizdata has been having technical problems for the last two days.

We are looking for new hosting arrangements but we have just put a short term 'fix' in place which should get us up and running for now, so do not fear, we are not about to go belly-up!

Hopefully normal output will resume shortly!

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Our faithful readers may have noticed that Samizdata.net was down. Hopefully, the problem is fixed now and we shall be blogging our hearts out... from a critically rational libertarian perspective, obviously.

Some of us have also joined the ranks of warbloggers at The Command Post as we collectively surf the breaking news.

Click for on-target news

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As the London based Samizdatistas are meeting for a booze up at the Black Widow Pub on Gloucester Road this evening, there may be a lack of new articles tonight.

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I wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Saddam-free New Year!

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Season's greetings to all our readers from all of us at Samizdata.net!

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Two of my blog-colleagues are struck down with computer-related grief.

Natalie Solent, who has been unable to blog since last Saturday, has asked Samizdata.net to pass on to as many of her regular readers as we can reach that she has not abandoned them on purpose, but has been wrenched away from them, by an attempt to upgrade from Windows Complicated to Windows Even More Complicated which has proved to be very complicated indeed. But she will be back, just as soon as it's all sorted.

And if you're wondering why it's techno-moron me telling you this rather than Perry de Havilland, well as you may have guessed already from his recent blog-silence, he too is having computer-related troubles, this time involving a hardware failure. It isn't going to be too expensive (it's one of the small connecting boxes rather than the big box itself which has collapsed), but the problem is proving to be time consuming, while Perry queues with other afflicted souls for the services of his computer-guru. He too is doing all he can to get back on line.

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Yes, I was briefly an Explorer Scout... but that's not what I'm writing about.

Given the article posted by Natalie I think Samizdata needs to think ahead of the Statist curve. I too find this so far beyond my worst nightmares that I am near speechless - or whatever one calls the blogged word.

If anyone out there has their own server on a high bandwidth link and could work with Samizdata.net to set up a mirror and in the worst case scenario, free hosting, it would be much appreciated.

Here, for the Infidels, I repeat The Holy Word of The Goddess Liberty, (Praised be Her Name!) which I Worship above All Others and whose Word is not respected in the UK:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."

- US 1st Amendment

So take this Tranzi Scum!:

Victory to Israel! Hang Saddam! Shoot the Guantanamo terrorists! A HARM in every Al Qaeda's SUV! Nuke the Chechens! The only good al Qaeda is a Dead al Qaeda.

Thank you for your kind patience.

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In case anyone else has noticed... there seems to be a failure of DNS for Glenn Reynolds Instapundit. The company "DNS Services" seems to not be answering queries. He is still reachable by IP

I wonder if he realizes it... HEY GLENN, IF YOU FLUSH YOUR LOCAL CACHE YOU MIGHT LOSE TOUCH WITH YOUR SERVER!!!

Later... 0400 GMT: All seems well again over at Instapundit.

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Our Debian Linux-based server is undergoing a software update this afternoon (GMT) so please excuse us if any problems arise. Remote system upgrades are always "interesting" affairs.

Time passes...

All clear. Other than one near disaster with a critical library that got automatically de-installed when it shouldn't, all seems to have gone smoothly.

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Due to the Libertarian Alliance conference in London, there will be rather less posted on Samizdata until Monday.

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We updated to a newer release of Movable Type around 1800 GMT today. If you commented on something around that time and it was lost during the shuffle, please accept our apologies!

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The lack of new articles and comments has been due to a period of server problems...

We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming!

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...whilst keeping a stiff upper lip at all times.

Sarah Lawrence: distinctly red-faced

Dear Friends,

I regret to announce that my little comment yesterday was not aimed in entirely the right direction. Specifically, the writer whose conspiracy theory I was discussing was not the George Smith I found so delightful at the Youth 4 Liberty Summer Camp, but another George Smith (Just how many George Smiths are there anyway?). The writer I quoted was in fact, George F. Smith, and not in fact, “my” George Smith, who is in fact, George H. Smith.

Deepest apologies George F. Smith and particularly George H. Smith! I am so embarrassed! What a complete idiot!(1)

George H. Smith has been very gracious in his response to my gaffe, and has not even drawn to my attention the fact that I, with my almost-as-common name, should jolly well know better. It is mortifying to find that I have done to George H. Smith what so irks me myself that I occasionally think that no reasonable jury would convict if I were to take some small action – with a Colt M4A1 with M203 grenade launcher.

Well at least this clears up the otherwise quite inexplicable mystery of why my Y4L speech appeared to have made such little impact on the writer of the piece I quoted!

Sarah NO, NOT THE COLLEGE Lawrence

(1) I stress that the word “idiot” refers to myself and not to the friend who drew my attention to “our” George Smith's alleged article. I may not be able ever to face appearing in public without a paper bag over my head or ever again, but I am, as one would expect from an English woman such as I, keeping a stiff upper lip and taking responsibility for my own actions (and those of my friend, whom I'll never trust again... I'm sure he did it on purpose to make me look silly... not that I hold with paranoid conspiracies or anything).

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We have enabled 'comments' for samizdata.net posts on an experimental basis.

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It seems that our regular samizdata.net e-mail (as found in the sidebar) is now operational again and can be used once more.

Alas we seem to have lost some of the e-mails that were sent to us over the last week (i.e. since late last Friday) unless they were sent to our emergency address.

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Just a reminder that our e-mail is still buggered up, and has been so since last Friday. Please use our emergency e-mail rather than the one in ther side bar to contact us.

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Just a reminder that our e-mail is still knackered, and has been so since last Friday. Please use our emergency e-mail rather than the one in ther side bar to contact us.

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It seems our e-mail system is not working properly, with some e-mail sent to us over the last three days not arriving at our end at all. Please use our emergency backup e-mail address and re-send if you did not receive a reply from us to any communications, until our system comes back on-line.

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I am quite satisfied with the Café Press on-line shop we already have for Samizdata.net (they are currently running a sale in fact!), but does anyone out there know of any other on-line shop providers which offer tee-shirts in colours other than Ash Grey and White? I would love to do black and/or deep blue shirts with our logo in white as well!

Please e-mail us (see sidebar) if you know of any.

Thanks.

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Due to the chaos caused by the change over to the new blog format (plus the fact we actually have lives beyond blogging... shocking I know), many people to whom we have written saying we would link to them have not seen the link appear.

We will try to catch up with all the additional blog links (and perhaps cut a few inactive ones) over the next week or so. Feel free to remind us if we have previously promised to link to you

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After casting our eyes enviously at the Instapundit's and Bitter Girl's on-line shops, we decided to also open an on-line shop for Samizdata.net as well (click here or see our sidebar under 'Network')

Now you too can prove you are one with the sinister globalist Illuminati (not to mention defray the cost of setting up this nice new blog!)

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Feedback from most people regarding the new look Samizdata.net has been very positive. However a few people have reported strangeness.

The website is blue with white body text and lighter blue links. A few people have reported seeing our text as black and electric blue links, which is odd. It could be that older browsers which do not support css might have problems.

Please let us know by e-mail (see sidebar) if you are having problems, noting what browser/version/OS you are using.

I should look like this!
Please note that reducing the size of the screenshot in has made the blues
a somewhat darker in this picture than they really are

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Samizdata.net is our new look blog that replaces the blogspot hosted/blogger.com powered Libertarian Samizdata. We are now a Movable Type powered blog, fully searchable with thematic, author and date indexed archives.

It will take a while to fully index all our old archives but they are available indexed chronologically already.

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Once more our crappy domain name host is down. Please use our emergency contact address if you wish to e-mail us.

Update: Our regular e-mail seems to be working again.

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Editor's note

I agree with Brian Micklethwait's insistence on getting the nuances of spelling and nationality correct. So I am sure he would want me to point out that there is no such thing as a Slovakian - the adjective is Slovak.

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Concerning Brian's article below on Euro-Britain for fruitbat read moonbat throughout.

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Due to a major UK routing server going splat, our e-mail is not working at the moment (and neither is that of several dozen UK ISPs apparently). If you sent us any e-mail this afternoon, you might want to resend it to our back-up address.

As it is such a major router which has done down, it will hopefully be repaired quite soon.

Update as of 18:45 GMT: The problem has been fixed!

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Although we have reduced the amount of blogs to which we link on the Samizdata main page, we have added a separate links and photographs page. We will occasionally add new photographs there every now and then if we can catch a member of the Samizdata Team in a compromising situation.

We added the links page as the sidebar was becoming unmanagable and the links list was in danger of melting down... a sort of blogger China Syndrome.

Update, July 2002: since our transmogification to Samizdata.net, this has all changed

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The regular Samizdata e-mail address is back up and running after our domain host finally clubbed the misbehaving server into submission like a baby seal.

Feedback should go to: [address removed]

If you have them, the various other samizdata.net e-mail addresses are now functional again.

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For much of today, we have been having e-mail problems (i.e. the domain hosting server is down), so if you e-mailed any of the usual addresses, we probably did not get it.

As a temporary measure, please send all e-mails to samizdata at cloister.dircon.co.uk until you get the all clear.

Oh happy happy joy joy, we love our domain server!

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As the ever lengthening stalactite of side bar links was becoming unfeasibly long, I have moved a big chunk of them to a separate page. This new page is also full of juicy goodness and well work you visiting.

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We have been deluged with interesting e-mails for publication in the last week, so please do not take it personally if we do not always publish yours. Sometimes we do not publish submissions for editorial reasons or due to excessive length but more usually it is simply because we do not always have the time. Samizdata is a loose but more or less functioning anarchy, so having someone to edit and publish a submission is a rather hit-and-miss affair depending on who does or does not have the time to do it. At the moment the main limiting factor is the sheer amount of incoming e-mail and our available time to digest them all!

And for all who have asked: Natalija Radic is currently off skiing in Austria and so I do not expect to see her posting again for several days yet.

By the way, a few links may have vanished off the side bar due to a minor mishap during template surgery, followed by doing the daily back up the wrong way. Doh!

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The regular Samizdata e-mail addresses seem to be working again, so please resume using our usual reply mail (see side bar) and the other Samizdata addresses if you know them, rather than the emergency e-mail address previously posted.

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Our usual e-mail address is temporarily down, so in the meantime we can be contacted at samizdata-at-cloister.dircon.co.uk

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As many of you may already know, blogger.com and blogspot hosting was down for most of today. We will be looking to move off the blogspot server in the near future.

Also thanks to Sandra who sent us the 100k screen shot. We hope you like your extorted prize. We blew through 100,000 visitors fast.

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Adil, all messages to your e-mail address are bouncing. I need to get in contact with you a.s.a.p!

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Our ISP e-mail problems have been sorted out and we are receiving all e-mails properly once more.

Anyone one who did not receive a reply to an e-mail sent to us in the last 24 hours or so might want to send their e-mail again as it does seem that the dircon server ate a few incoming mails. Yummy.

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Samizdata seems to be having e-mail problems (or rather the ISP through whom the e-mail routes is having problems), so we may not be getting all incoming mail at the moment (as of 23:15 GMT). It is unclear how long this problem has been going on. I shall report when we are back in touch with the blogosphere.

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Sorry but our hosting server has maxed out and thus you may (or may not) have problems seeing the pictures you have have come to see... this will be fixed by tomorrow.

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The objective of this blog is to disseminate news and views of interest to people who view the world from a critically rational libertarian perspective. Blogs can give us a means to break free of the old meta-contextual world views of 'left' and 'right' and establish a meta-context of our own, independent of statist and collectivist assumptions and underpinning.

Samizdata wants to receive content that deals with libertarian issues, but we also want to read whatever is of interest to critically rational people, from the deadly serious to the utterly frivolous. We are a group of people with wide interests and highly divergent backgrounds: a motley crew of Libertarians, Extropians, recovering Neo-Conservatives and wild eyed anarchists.

Post away and remember... let's NOT be safe out there!