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I could not possibly let the day pass by without reference to the death of Marlon Brando.

As far as I am concerned, there are actors, good actors and then there are stars. Brando was a star. But of all the roles he played, I will remember him best for his potrayal of mafia boss, Vito Corleone, in the Godfather. Not only did his enormous screen presence seer itself into every frame, but he took this character and turned it into a genuine cultural icon.

R.I.P Marlon Brando.

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Lord Clarkeltine of EUphoromania, in a minor speech to Moonshine News 24 this afternoon, said that the case for the EEUUGGHH! needed to be made more vigorously, decisively, forcefully and adverbially.

People say that the EEUUGGH! is an undemocratic and bureaucratic monstrosity, said Lord Clarkeltine, which is robbing the people of Europe and enmeshing them in a web of regulatory guff, and threatening to drive them back to a new dark age of economic slump and third class status, just so that a corrupt elite of EEUUGGHH!rocrats can eat free lunches for ever and live in big houses in the countryside. They say that the EEUUGGHH! will end a thousand years of Britain's history as a sovereign nation. They say that the EEUUGGHH! is a pathetic attempt to replace the USA as the top world power which threatens to bankrupt everybody. They say that the EEUUGGHH! should be learning from the recent free market inspired progress of India and China, but is instead making a new EUSSRGGHH! in the Heart of Europe.

I will answer these claims firmly and decisively, vigorously and forcefully answering myth with fact, fantasy with reality, vicious xenophobic mudslinging with cool, clean, clear Vichy Water. No it isn't. No it won't. No it shouldn't. It's jolly nice. And we must say this again and again, time after time, repeatedly and repeatedly. The case for the EEUUGGHH! needs to be made eloquently and forcefully, decisively and realistically, realistically and persuasively, persuasively, and forcefully, and thisly, thatly and theotherly.

Asked why nobody was explaining why the EEUUGGHH! is nice and not nasty, Lord Clarkeltine was adamantly adamant:

I blame the Prime Minister. He promised us that he would con everyone about the EEUUGGHH! but he hasn't done it. Lying bastard. The Prime Minister can explain anything. Why hasn't he explained that the EEUUGGHH! is good? Obviously I could, but I'm too grand. The Prime Minister is ordinary. He should do it.

But what about when the EEUUGGHH! does stupid things?

Yes, Lord Clarkeltine continued continuously, warming warmly to his subjects, people complain about how the EEUUGGHH! is shutting down this or that stupid little industry, like fishing and bread-baking and, you know, mucky things of that sort. The answer, he insisted insistently, is that in order not to get too involved in the EEUUGGHH! Britain has to get more involved in the EEUUGGHH!

All you have to do to get the EEUUGGHH! to change the rules for you, give you money and lunches and a free town house in Brussels etcetera, is swear an oath of undying loyalty to it, vote YES to whatever the EEUUGGHH! says and sing the last movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony every morning and every night. What is the problem with that? We need to be at the Heart of EEUUGGHH!rope, to help it do bad things to all the other countries – and, yes, to Britain too, because one has to be realistic – and then ask the EEUUGGHH! nicely to be a bit less nasty to us and nastier to somebody else. It's inevitable. It's the future. You can't argue against it, so stop it at once.

Lord Clarkeltine also said that the BBC was letting the side down with its relentlessly relentless diet of anti-EEUUGGHH! propaganda. They keep asking questions, he complained complaintively, about just how wonderful the EEUUGGHH! is, and about why the EEUUGGHH! doesn't present itself better and why more and more of the little people still don't like it. The BBC shouldn't be asking questions, Lord Clarkeltine said, sayingfully. It should be supplying answers.

Lord Clarkeltine is an Honorary President for Ever of the Institute For Why We Are Right About Everything, an Assume Tank with offices in London, Brussels and the Sea of Tranquility.

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Where liberty is, there is my country
- Benjamin Franklin

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Yesterday, while out and about in London town, I espied this vehicle.

Does this Samizdatista perhaps visit London more often than he tells us, on business he has omitted to mention?

Well, probably not. This is probably just another fan of this.

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It takes a lot to make me doubt the benefits of the free movement of people, money, ideas, goods and services. But a new report published by the Centre for the New Europe raises some questions about parallel trade in the European Union.

In today's Wall Street Journal, Stephen Pollard explains the harm that can be caused by the re-exporting of pharmaceuticals from a country such as Spain, where regulated prices are low, sometimes under different labels and with inaccurate expiry dates, to countries where prices are regulated higher, such as Germany and the UK.

Until now my own view has been so what?

If a company sells products in two countries at different prices then an entrepreneurial opportunity may exist for traders to exploit. Demand in the cheaper country goes up, pushing up prices there, and supply increases in the more expensive country, pushing prices down. We may not see equal prices everywhere because there may be other factors affecting costs: land prices, distance, demographic differences, even the cultural acceptability of using medication. But with price controls in the various countries, the market process is subverted: increased demand in Spain does not lead to higher prices and increased supply does not produce lower prices in Germany (except possibly in the 'informal sector').

The EU appears to be promoting the compulsion to sell the same product everywhere in the EU, which is a violation of a person's right to choose to sell or not. So what I would at first glance dismiss as special pleading by a corporate lobby turns out to be an anomaly. The CNE estimates that more than 3 people could be dying every two hours as a result of these regulations.

If the EU really wants freer trade, it should start by challenging the price control systems of its own member states.

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I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let's start with typewriters.
- Frank Lloyd Wright

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Over on the Social Affairs Unit blog, Michael Mosbacher takes Seamas Milne to task for the idiotic statement in the Guardian that the people fighting the US and UK are the 'real' liberation movement in Iraq, not the people who toppled Saddam Hussain.

On the broader topic of anti-Americanism however Mosbacher points out that Seamas Milne has a quite a way to go before he reaches the 'stature' of that florid friend of tyranny the world over, Harold Pinter, who has long been a pet hate of mine and others on this blog.

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They're against NATO? What are they for? Soviet troops racing across Europe, eating all the croissants?

- US Naval Officer Fred Boynton (played by Chris Eigeman), in Whit Stillman's Barcelona, a film that appears wiser by the day.

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Scaling up one's beliefs about how individual human nature to a collective, and especially national, scale, is always a dicey business. With the hotting up and late engagement of some Western powers, but not others, in the current war, it looks as though there may be some basis for my long-time suspicion that welfare for nations has many of the same pernicious effects as welfare for individuals.

The specific form of welfare I have in mind are the security forces stationed by the United States in a number of its allies. It is a source of continuing frustration to many Americans that the very nations we have done the most for have, in turn, been the least willing to pitch in with us. However, the reason they oppose us is precisely because we protect them from the consequences of their beliefs. Count on Mark Steyn to crystallize the issue:

More importantly, the prolongation of the American security guarantee has been disastrous for those allies, transforming them into ersatz postmodern allies who require you to engage in months of elaborate diplomatic tap-dancing in order to get them to contribute a couple of hundred poorly equipped troops. There’s a line conservatives are fond of when they’re discussing welfare: What’s better for a man? To give him a fish? Or to teach him to fish for himself? That goes double for defence welfare. The continued US presence in Europe is bad for Europe and bad for the US.

The presence of American troops guarding their frontiers has relieved our European allies, and to a somewhat lesser degree the Japanese and the South Koreans, of the responsiblity of providing for their own national security. As a result, these nations have largely disarmed, much as the residents of major US cities protected by large and visible police forces have disarmed, and the internal politics of these countries mirrors the politics of US urban centers on issues of national/personal security.

Just to pick one area of congruence, European nations believe that it is unnecessary for anyone to maintain a large armed deterrent to attackers, just as urban liberals believe it is unnecessary for an individual to own a gun for self-defense. Because such an armed deterrent is unnecessary, use of it is unjustifiable by either nations or individuals. Thus, armed self-defense is illegitimate, and violent threats to personal or national security are to be met either with more welfare directed at "root causes," or with jaw-jaw by social worker/diplomats, rather than war-war.

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All those readers of this who particularly liked Dale Amon's reporting of and ruminating upon this, and whose reaction to this was: I want more! ... should look at these.

These being, in English rather than pure linkese, a stunning set of photos taken by Richard Seaman of the first flight of SpaceShipOne into space, on June 21st 2004. (My thanks to Joseph Brennan for an email with the link.)

Great as the photos of the various air and space craft are, I especially like the very first photo, of all the people watching it, and of course photographing it. Although I doubt if many of them got photos as good as Richard Seaman's.

Seaman used a Canon 1Ds digital SLR camera, a snip at $8,000.

Seaman is a fine photographer, but much of the genius of these photos lies in the automatic focus system that this camera has in it. More fuss should be made of the people who devise things like this, I think. Boy would I love one of these - but smaller and for nearer $80, in a couple of years time.

The 1Ds sports the same 45 point auto-focus system as its predecessor, the 1D. Users on the Canon chat group I follow insisted that the auto-focus system is not only effective in achieving sharp focus, it also does so blindingly fast. One story I remember hearing is that if you point a 1Ds and a D60 at the same object at the same time, and someone walks between the cameras and the object and keeps walking, then the 1Ds would refocus on the person and then back on the object, while the D60 wouldn't react to the person at all!

Ideal for space ships, in other words. Although I recommend a general rootle around Seaman's photographs. If that appeals, I suggest that this list of recent additions would be a fine place to start.

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The animal welfare charity, the RSPCA, wants lawmakers to ban 'non-official' firework displays and outlaw sales of fireworks which make very loud bangs, due to the distress this causes to dogs, cats and other animals, including livestock.

Now, it would be dead easy for we libertarians to immediately characterise this sort of thing as the obsession of a bunch of control freaks who want to remove our fun. I can certainly see that point. As a kid, I loved the annual Bonfire Night firework display of November 5, when my dad invariably built an enormous fire at our farm and let off vast numbers of fireworks.

But libertarians are also conscious of the issue of property rights. If I am a dog owner, and I do not want my canine companion to be traumatised by loud bangs coming from my neighbour's property, can and should I be able to find a way to get the noise stopped? Do repeated loud noises constitute an invasion of my property rights? Or should I be able to make some kind of agreement, perhaps even involving money? For example, the firework lovers could offer a neighbour a cash sum, or offer to take the neighbour's pets to a kennel home (soundproofed!) for the evening?

Sound 'pollution' can be hard to enforce via property rights, but that does not mean it would be impossible to do so. So at the risk of attracting the ire of firework nuts, I sympathise with this particular RSPCA cause, but obviously vastly prefer solutions which mean that enthusiasts of firework displays, both amateur and official, can enjoy a party while their neighbours' pets are not sent into agonies.

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A new study, based upon the census date from 1991 and 2001, has concluded that New Labour's redistributive policies and demands for social justice, have failed to halt the long-term trend towards greater inequality. If you live in the South, in the countryside or the suburb and are well-educated, you are likely to be richer and healthier.

In our post-Christian society, the researchers have still taken the biblical warning that the poor will always be present to heart. Of course, they now have to redefine the poverty in order to substantiate their conclusion that Britain is more unequal:

The poverty measure used is the Breadline Britain measure This defines a household as poor if the majority of people in Britain, at the time of calculation, would think that household to be poor

Britain is more unequal because the majority of the population have concluded that it has become more unequal. Hmmm...

Nevertheless, there are stretches of genuine poverty in Britain where families will go hungry for the sake of their children.

The research appeared to confirm other reports earlier this month which showed that about half of Glasgow's population lived in deprived areas, with many parents going hungry in order to feed their children.

The actions of parents in such straitened circumstances are admirable, but their sacrifice is surely unnecessary. It is another example of socialism condemning the past and endeavouring to repeat it.

Shouldn't advocates of social justice campaign for the abolition of the Common Agricultural Policy and the removal of all EU tariffs on agricultural products, providing cheaper food for all, especially the deprived of Glasgow, who are going hungry in the 21st century?

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One way to guarantee Bush's reelection.

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Meanwhile, in Gotham City:

People who kill bats or destroy their roosts are to be targeted in a nationwide police campaign.

Officers are to be trained in how to investigate damage to roosts as part of Operation Bat, which is officially launched on Wednesday.

Police will also be warning builders, roofers and pest control workers that it is a crime to destroy bat roosts.

Ker-pow! Take that, you builders. Spla-tt! Not so fast, roofer-man. Ka-boom! It's the Gotham City jail for you, pest control worker.

Conservationists hope the crackdown will help protect dwindling native numbers of the nocturnal mammal.

With the added benefit of thwarting the fiendish plans of The Joker, The Riddler and The Penguin.

Surely you do not have to be Superhero to appreciate that the very essence of private property is exclusivity. That means the owner is entitled to eject all manner of other living things regardless of the number of legs and wings they possess. Otherwise, what is the point of private property? If we are obliged to maintain our homes as wildlife sanctuaries then we may as well revert to living in forests under the shelter of banana leaves.

Never mind the 'dwindling native numbers of nocturnal mammals', what about the dwindling native numbers of property rights?

I just hope that these apparently well-connected 'conservationists' do not take it into their heads to add wasps, rats or cockroaches to their little list.

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Rob Fisher has discovered a foolproof plan for getting invited to our famed Blogger Bashes...

...advertising Samizdata.net at the Glastonbury festival

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The present UK government, like many socialist-leaning administrations, does not like cars. Besides complaints - sometimes justified - about pollution and congestion, a lot of the hatred of the car contains a puritan impulse (sometimes this is also seen among a certain tweedy sort of conservative). Congestion charges, petrol taxes, speed cameras, road bumps... you name it, owning a car will soon be on a par with smoking, eating red meat, or confessing to enjoying recreational sex.

Well, I have bad news for the puritans. I spent last Saturday in total petrol-head heaven - the annual Goodwood Festival of Speed in west Sussex, and the event was a total sellout. I saw the Lotus of the late Ayrton Senna driven immaculately on a wet track at 150 mph and hear the unbelievably high noise that a F1 car makes. Vintage Maseratis, Ferraris, Lotuses and BRMs vied with Le Mans endurance cars such as the Ford GT40 or the Gulf Porsche (of the kind that Steve McQueen drove in the movie, Le Mans). Magic. There is an almost sensual pleasure involved in the sight, shape, noise, and yes, the smell, of a very fast car.

The crowds were large although not so big as to impede my enjoyment. From what I could see, Britons remain firmly in love with cars, including very fast and noisy ones. I would not presume to check the political/cultural views of the crowds, but I would guess the bias would be towards liberal (small l), fairly pro-enterprise, pro-fun, and not very keen on environmentalism and high taxes. If I were Conservative Party leader Michael Howard, then the Goodwood Festival of Speed clientele would be the sort of folk I would have in mind as a target constituency. I would call it the 'Jeremy Clarkson Voter Segment'.

The Goodwood event also reminded me of something else, which is the high number of South Africans, Finns and Scots who have excelled as drivers over the years. I wonder why that is?

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"Many of you are well enough off that... the tax cuts may have helped you. We're saying that for America to get back on track, we're probably going to cut that short and not give it to you. We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good."

Hillary Clinton, at a San Francisco fundraiser for fellow statist Sen. Boxer.

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Imagine the European People's Democratic Front.
Imagine their first press release...

We, the people of Europe, hold the following truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. - That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Unfortunately, we don't consent to a junket-ocracy, which is what the proposed EU will be.

As such, we undertake to occupy and subvert any referendum in Luxembourg, a country with a conveniently tiny voting population of less than 350,000. One residential mailing address (with 50,000 registered residents) later, and the constitution will be consigned, where it belongs, to the dustbin of history.

SlowJoe

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Paul Bremer has left the country... Two days earlier than was expected, he handed the administration over to the Iraqi government under Iyad Allawi. More than 100,000 foreign troops will remain as well as the funds voted for by the American Congress to finance the work of reconstruction.

John Keegan offers a 'meta-contextual perspective' on what is "rotten in the state of Iraq" (and in Washington) with regard to the aftermath of probably the most successful war ever fought between a democracy and a dictatorship. The entourage of highly opinionated advisers, that have become known as "neo-conservatives" may be at the root of the problem with the ill-conceived nation-building in Iraq:

A more accurate way of describing them would be as "post-Marxists", in that, like many 20th-century intellectuals, their thinking was formed in reaction to the Soviet system, whether originally for or against. In the world in which they matured, it was impossible not to perceive politics as the supreme and dominant human activity. Their perception had distorting after-effects.

The new conservatives who had rejected Left-wing solutions to the world's problems were nevertheless left with the conviction that any solution would be political. Confronted by the residue of tyranny, as in post-Soviet Eastern Europe, they expected democracy to take its place. Inside any people's democracy, they might have said, there is a real democracy struggling to get out. In the case of eastern Europe, they were genuinely right.

Although the journey to freedom and democracy in the former communist bloc has not been straightforward, the assumption that those who opposed the communist tyranny saw democracy as the natural alternative, was certainly correct.

The neo-conservatives' mistake was to suppose that, wherever tyranny ruled, democracy was its natural alternative. So, when planning for the government of post-war Iraq, the lead agency, the Pentagon, dominated by neo-conservatives, jumps to the conclusion that, as soon as Saddam's tyranny was destroyed, Iraqi democrats would emerge to assume governmental responsibility from the liberating coalition and a pro-Western regime would evolve seamlessly from the flawed past.

To think in such a way was to reveal a dangerously post-Marxist cast of mind. Marxists can think only in political terms. They accept, even if they despise, liberal and conservative opposition. What they cannot accept is that their opponents may be motivated by beliefs which are not political in any way at all.

John Keegan concludes that the real opposition force is religion. There are others opposing the American presence, such as the survivors of the Ba'ath Party, a strictly secular organisation, however, religion is the only force that can provide an 'alternative', however flawed, to the current state of affairs. He admonished the Americans for dissolving the Iraqi army or police or civil administration, regardless of the number of Ba'ath Party members they contained.

Perhaps the current security problems in Iraq prove him right. I do not know whether using ex-Ba'athists in the post-Saddam Iraq would have prevented the deterioration of security in Iraq we have witnessed. I do, however, have a problem with moral implications of not purging the society of those who propped an oppressive regime. One man cannot sustain a totalitarian regime alone, it is the thousands of 'little' authoritarians that help to maintain the regime's grip on its victims and destroy its opponents. I believe it was wrong (morally and politically) for the countries of Central and Eastern Europe not conduct a thorough 'de-communisation' of their political systems and societies. Similarly, I believe de-Ba'athification is desirable for the Iraqi society to find its footing.

However, I also find it hard to disagree with Keegan's parting shot:

Looking back, better a Ba'athist Iraq than an Islamic one. Let us hope that it is not too late.

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Michael Moore bans Michael Moore?

It seems the new stupid campaign finance regulations in the USA (the result of Michael Moore's years of vomit among others) are about to be used to restrict distribution of Moore's latest wind-up.

Because the law attempts to prohibit all sorts of 'in kind' donations to the Republicans [I meant political parties], making a movie that plugs one candidate at the expense of another in election year could be ruled "interference" by the Federal Electoral Commission. I wonder how Michael Moore feels being felt sorry for by the US Libertarian Party.

Of course it is a shocking abuse of the US constitution. (sigh) How sad!

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I finally have all my photographs in hand, or on disk rather. As promised, here is the behind the scenes photo story (via a small fixed lens film camera) of the people and the historic event they came to celebrate.

The first leg of my journey from Belfast ended at Dublin Connolly Rail Station.
Copyright D.Amon, all rights reserved

After a night of revelry with some Dubln based musicians I flew to Los Angeles by way of Charles deGaulle Airport. Might Dissident Frogman have noticed disturbance in the Force as a Samizdata Editor flew over France?
Copyright D.Amon, all rights reserved

The contents of the house in Redondo Beach have gone elsewhere but Rand Simberg still managed the network connections and 24 Hour News Feed necessary to the health and well being of bloggers.
Copyright D.Amon, all rights reserved

Aleta Jackson got stuck with the job of keeping us all fed and watered... as well as helping co-ordinate event staff all over the airport.
Copyright D.Amon, all rights reserved

How many rocket scientists does it take to put out a burning barbie?
Copyright D.Amon, all rights reserved

Dr Pournelle is outstanding in the field... and you knew he was there long before you could see him.
Copyright D.Amon, all rights reserved

A long shot of the XCOR barbecue. I understand it went on much of Sunday, although Rand and I did not arrive until evening.
Copyright D.Amon, all rights reserved

Mouser, the XCOR hangar-cat, decided a padded equipment box was just purrfect for sleeping through the territorial invasion.
Copyright D.Amon, all rights reserved

Rick Tumlinson of Space Frontier Foundation (and MirCorp fame) was caught in the act of bartending at the XCOR hangar.
Copyright D.Amon, all rights reserved

XCOR did their party piece: a teacart engine firing just after dark.
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The XCOR Shelter for Homeless Rocket Scientists. Besides myself behind the camera, Rand Simberg of Transterrestrial Musings is to the left; Michael Mealing of RocketForge is in the centre; and I have not a clue who the laptop wielding person to the right is.
Copyright D.Amon, all rights reserved

Meanwhile over at the National Space Society (NSS) RV's... Bethany lights up the camper.
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Randall Severy, sitting at right, is the current NSS Hero of the Revolution for helping recover the NSS membership database (don't ask!) and is also one of the key people in the Artemis Society and Moon Society.
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Meanwhile outside, the DJ plays music in the wind-driven sand. It was 2004. It was loud. "If it's too loud, you're too old", as we say in the music biz.
Copyright D.Amon, all rights reserved

A shot of the midnight crowd. The haziness and blobs are due to the sand. There was plenty of food and kegs of beer outside so I am quite sure I brought a wee bit of the Mojave back to Belfast with me.
Copyright D.Amon, all rights reserved

Aleta was at her post in the hangar when I returned from the NSS and SFF party and as far as I know did not get any sleep until Monday afternoon.
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Rand's first thought's in the morning were blog related of course...
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Aleta and other XCOR staff served bacon and an "egg-like substance" (as the person frying the eggs labeled it) starting around 0400 or earlier.
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Yes, someone really did sleep under the wing of a rocket plane!
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There were lots more than the fried stuff on the hangar breakfast serving line. Lovely strawberries, other fruit... and most importantly: good coffee.
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Aleta wills the bacon to fry faster.
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Dawn's first light. Cue 'Top Gun Anthem'.
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Sunrise.
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XCOR spectators watching for activity at Scaled Composites, a couple hangars down that-a-way.
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Low level chase plane (Coleman/Bird) taxi's past on the way to the active.
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White Knight (Binnie and Stinemetze) with the underslung SpaceShipOne (Melvill) taxi's past XCOR.
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Rutan's own Beech Starship (Karkow/Scherer), one of the last of its kind, on the way to the active. It is one of the high altitude chase planes.
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The Starship takes off. (Cockpit below it is a NASA T-38).
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White Knight and SpaceShipOne in the air!
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Crowd along the tarmac as I walked down towards the Control Tower.
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Alpha Jet (Van der Schueren/Johnson) on the taxiway. It is the second high chase plane.
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Now we watch and wait as the planes slowly circle up to the 50,000 foot drop altitude. Notice that even this early in the morning most everyone in the XCOR area has moved into the shade...
Copyright D.Amon, all rights reserved

One of the XCOR people jury-rigged a walkie talkie on the flight frequency to a PA system so we could hear what was going on far above as we stood outside the hanger and watched.
Copyright D.Amon, all rights reserved

This was a good time for me to take a daylight shot of the XCOR EZ-Rocket.
Copyright D.Amon, all rights reserved

George Whitesides, center, is the new NSS Executive Director. The outdoor, all-night RV/Disco/Keg party seems to have been his idea... I think I am going to enjoy his tenure!
Copyright D.Amon, all rights reserved

At 20,000 feet or so we could see contrails. This made it a lot easier to find the little itsy bitsy dots way up there.
Copyright D.Amon, all rights reserved

Drop... and IGNITION!!! Unfortuneately they were coming out of the sun when they did so... thus my need for a handshaped occulting disk.
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They climbed...
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and climbed...
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and climbed...
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and climbed...
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and climbed...
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and burned out a mere 75 seconds later.
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Then all we could do was listen to the cockpit chatter as Mike Melvill coasted over the top and into re-entry. It was a nervous time. Re-entry was the time I personally was most worried about.
Copyright D.Amon, all rights reserved

SpaceShipOne was well off the Mojave airport so it was awhile before we saw it. Here it is making a turn over the field as it dumps energy in preperation for the landing. I believe SpaceShipOne is upper right and the Beech Starship is lower left.
Copyright D.Amon, all rights reserved

Starship and Alpha Jet (I am not absolutely certain of the identifications from looking at my blowups) come in low as SpaceShipOne glides into a landing.
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White Knight beats up the active on a victory pass.
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Somewhere against the background clutter of stored airliners there is a spaceship sitting on the runway where its rollout completed.
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This is a bit of a blow up. It is there somewhere...
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A formation pass of the three chase planes. The smoke is from the aerobatic low chase plane; the other two are fast jets: the Alpha Jet and the Beech Starship.
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With all the media and potential investors floating around the airport, Jeff Greason (centre) felt it necessary to put on a disguise.
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An atmospheric shot of the XCOR EZ-Rocket.
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The crowd in the XCOR hangar after the flight. Two of the XCOR rocket scientists made icecream for us... mix milk and fresh strawberries in a blender, then stir continuously in a stainless steel bowl while an assistant pours in the Liquid Nitrogen... Took about 10 minutes altogether and tasted great.
Copyright D.Amon, all rights reserved

NASA T-38 flown in by an Astronaut.
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Doug Jones (at table in pink shirt) controlling an indoor demonstration firing of the teacart engine. Believe me, it is loud!!!! This engine will be part of the RCS on Xereus, their next step.
Copyright D.Amon, all rights reserved

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David Sucher seems to like to have the last word on his blog City Comforts, and as it is his blog, he gets to call the tune and delete comments as he sees fit. That said, his claim that he only deletes comments which do not have real e-mail addresses is simply untrue. Nevertheless, his blog, his rules. Fair enough, we set our comment editorial policy here on Samizdata.net as we see fit too.

I took Sucher to task for what seemed to me to be some vindictive comments aimed at Jackie D, one of the Samizdatistas, regarding comments over on Harry's Place and on his own blog that were started off by Dick Cheney's indelicate words on the US Senate floor. My final comment on David Sucher's blog was deleted, so... this one's for you, David:

I am, as you point out, a 'libertarian' (for what of a better word. I prefer 'liberal' myself, or even 'social individualist'), so the reference to 'statism' cannot be put aside. However the fact there are indeed a great many libertarian jackasses is not germane at all.

The use of the term statist in my comment is to demonstrate that I (like Jackie) regard both parties as odious and largely interchangeable thieves, and therefore the issue of Cheney telling someone to "go fuck themselves" is, to me, not a very damaging uses of language in a legislature. I wish all they ever did was curse at each other, but alas they do eventually get down to the serious business of administering looting rights. So for me, it is all rather a non-issue for the same reasons Jackie indicated.

Both here and on Harry's blog you commented "It's obviously not the saying of "fuck yourself" which is the issue"... but you are quite incorrect as Jackie makes clear that is *indeed* the issue she is talking about, not Dick Cheney.

As she was defending the use of "Go fuck yourself" when appropriate, rather than Dick Cheney himself, it seems that her disinclination to get into what I have described as a partisan 'two minute hate', adding to the chorus of "Oh those wicked Republicans", was what incurred your ire and intemperate language. We all have tetchy days on our blogs but you do yourself no credit given the length you seem to have gone to to pick a fight with her.

So I am not holding "feeling better" as a standard for public behaviour because for me the issue is *your* behaviour, not Dick Cheney's.

With due regard.

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The business and economics sections of the press have been dominated by the problems of private pensions in recent months. Once a dull-as-ditchwater subject about which journalists and the public showed little interest, the state of our retirement nest eggs is now a major policy issue. Hundreds of blue-chip British firms have shut pension plans to new staff, such as those which offer to pay a benefit linked to final salary at retirement age. Some workers even suffered the torment of losing all their accumulated pension when their sponsoring firms went to the wall. All in all, it has been an alarming time for those dreaming of retirement.

But to read the media, you would hardly know that the biggest pension scandal of all is in the state system. James Bartholomew, writing in the Sunday Telegraph, pens a scorching denunciation of state pensions. He points out that we are told by the experts that retirement ages will have to rise, and, to be fair, improved life expectancy (surely a triumph of health and living standards rather than a problem) makes that a sensible option. But taxpayers who paid their national "insurance" contributions are being told that the state is welshing on its side of the bargain. If a private business operated on the same basis as the government did with tax-funded pensions, the directors would be sent to jail for mis-selling on an epic scale.

Reform of our creaking state pensions system remains one of the most intractable public policy issues of the age. The destination -- a system of privately held accounts may be obvious to a free market zealot like me, but getting there is going to be very, very hard unless politicians have the sense, and the courage, to scrap all taxes on savings income and capital gains to make widespread long term private saving a reality.

The present state of affairs cannot endure.

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James Lileks captures the angst of the social statist in America in this exchange regarding John Kerry's promise to raise taxes by rolling back the rather meager and back-loaded Bush tax cuts:

Then came the Parable of the Stairs, of course. My tiresome, shopworn, oft-told tale, a piece of unsupportable meaningless anecdotal drivel about how I turned my tax cut into a nice staircase that replaced a crumbling eyesore, hired a few people and injected money far and wide . . . . Raise my taxes, and it won’t happen – I won’t hire anyone, and they won’t hire anyone, rent anything, buy anything. You see?

“Well, it’s a philosophical difference,” she sniffed. She had pegged me as a form of life last seen clilcking the leash off a dog at Abu Ghraib. “I think the money should have gone straight to those people instead of trickling down.” Those last two words were said with an edge.

“But then I wouldn’t have hired them,” I said. “I wouldn’t have new steps. And they wouldn’t have done anything to get the money.”

“Well, what did you do?” she snapped.

“What do you mean?”

“Why should the government have given you the money in the first place?”

“They didn’t give it to me. They just took less of my money.”

That was the last straw. Now she was angry. And the truth came out:

“Well, why is it your money? I think it should be their money.”

Two responses to this last quote. First, it is James' money because he earned it. Second, he has no objection to it becoming the worker's money, so long as they earn it from him. In fact, the money James kept because of his tax cut now is the worker's money. Her point, such as it is, evaporates into thin air.

The only difference? Mr. Lileks, sturdy Midwesterner that he is, believes people should should earn their money. His earnest young interlocutor, following in the sadly well-worn path of Minnesota socialism, thinks money should shower down like manna from heaven.

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And now for something completely different. Matthew Maly writes in with a fascinating and challenging essay about Islam, civil society, Iraq, Western Civilisation, American politics, Jennifer Lopez, the fixed quantity of wealth fallacy, strange Shiite self-flagellation, tribesman with no clothes... well, about all those things and much, much more. Whether you agree with the general thrust of it or not, it is very interesting stuff

Having bombed some mosques, George W. Bush has built a Protestant mosque at Abu-Ghraib prison. Here, the Iraqi Moslems are taught that pork may be good for them and that the teachings of the Holy Koran are supposed to be subordinated to the teachings of Democracy, as represented by handpicked Iraqi exiles protected by American armor.

As many people before him with a gleam in their eye and fervor in their speeches, George W. Bush wanted to do good. As many revolutionaries before him he fell victim to technology, too awesome to reveal its implications.

Technology as the main cause of revolutions

Martin Luther, George W. Bush’s intellectual predecessor, correctly sensed that thanks to improved manufacturing processes, people were becoming economically independent. They no longer wished to be led blindly, to be told to behave “just so” without being given a reason that they could intellectually accept. People were becoming literate, able to read the Bible by themselves, and to think about their lives in a more rational way. The Germans, British, and Dutch did not speak a Romance language, and now they wanted church services in their own language since they simply did not understand Latin. Suddenly, they had become mature enough to want their Mass to be more meaningful, that is, understandable, to them. And when the language of the Mass became an issue, there were other matters to discuss. The Catholic Church failed to account for the social change that manufacturing brought about, and Germanic peoples turned Protestant as a result. The French, Italians, Spanish, and Portuguese remained Catholic, since a Latin Mass was understandable to them. Thus the Protestant revolution reflected the fact that manufacturing technology had made people more self-sufficient, able to read and to think for themselves.

The twentieth century saw several totalitarian revolutions, precipitated by an incorrect understanding of industrial technology. God of the Bible created everything to be unique: a Man, a Woman, the Sun, and the Earth. Ford created a Model T, and these cars were leaving the factory gates all exactly the same, 60 an hour, all painted black. The only inefficient and unpredictable part of the assembly line was the human.

Russia and Germany lost WWI, and thus had a reason to believe that the God of the Bible had failed them. But there was a new god: the Machine Tool. This new god created everything that constituted the world of a twentieth century European. A modern man no longer sees a starry sky: he sees the roof of his car, as he is completely surrounded by Machine Tool products. Shoes and shirts, tanks and bombs – everything is produced by the Machine Tool, and the shared virtues of all of these products are sameness and predictability. Moreover, these products are all inanimate. A Machine Tool, great and miraculous as it is, does not create cats. But if the world produced by the Machine Tool is inanimate, where does it leave humans?

If you worship the Machine Tool, it is logical to see humans as woefully imperfect, a product that needs to be recalled and recast, but to do that to all people is impractical. Thus, some types of people need to be proclaimed as being better than others, imperfect, but closer to the ideal. Hitler thought that the Aryans were the best, and there was a very convincing reason: some of them were proclaimed to have a 'proportional' skull, clearly a step in the right direction, especially if you think like a primitive, early 20th century machine tool. Since a curved nose was harder to manufacture, a good human had to have a straight nose; and the rest of his head was covered best by a steel helmet. Non-Aryan humans, thought Hitler, were only good to make soap or lampshades out of. Stalin was of a slightly different opinion. He thought that workers were best because they served the Holy Machine Tool, and capitalists were worst because they clamed to own It, blasphemously putting themselves above the Holy Mechanical Creator.

Hitler’s idea was, let us just say 'purely theoretical' because there were no Aryans and skull proportions had nothing to do with anything. Hitler himself certainly was not an 'Aryan' type. Stalin's idea was purely theoretical as well. While claiming that workers were valuable and had advanced knowledge in the form of a revolutionary theory, Stalin very much liked to clean minefields by making thousands of workers run over them.

What we have here is technology incorrectly understood. Yes, a Machine Tool can make products fast and efficiently, but it is not God the Creator. God is a Spiritual Being, and since every Human has a soul, each Human is infinitely valuable.

Hitler and Stalin thought that they were on the forefront of progress, that their actions were dictated by modern scientific and technical knowledge, and yet, the reality was exactly the opposite: they were guilty of unprecedented barbarity. And in their barbarity, they were indeed helped by technology, as Auschwitz was much more efficient in killing than a medieval three-day rampage in a sacked city.

Millions of people whose lives were touched by industrial technology followed the teachings of Hitler or Stalin and saw them as progressive simply because these people also misunderstood the implications of industrial technology.

Thus, we should always keep in mind that technology may have its dangers. If you see Iraq on TV a few times and suddenly feel that you understand the Iraqis, technology has let you down. And this does not mean that a TV in itself is bad: it simply means that it has not been given a proper place in your decision-making process and in your worldview.

Technology comes into our lives as a neat plaything, and then has a tendency to surreptitiously cause major negative results in unexpected places. A Machine Tool is much better in producing household goods than a medieval manufacturer. But that does not mean that people need to be 'recast' (to use a communist expression) or sent to Auschwitz.

When television was invented, it was not immediately clear that the entire nation would grow obese and stupid glued to the 24 hour sports channel and that the President would decide to invade a very distant and a very dissimilar country after having seen it on TV. When airplanes were not available we had much more respect for distant places, but now we can unwrap a piece of chewing gum, push a launch button, and a missile will obliterate a city while the gum is still sweet in our mouth. That’s too fast.

But it was not the TV that caused our President to make a hasty decision. The technology that misled him is far more basic and far more powerful: it is the social technology of win/win, a supreme and uniquely American invention.

Win/win vs. lose/lose

People have always thought that resources are scarce, and that therefore there is a need to fight over them. Every transaction had a winner and a loser, and there were such prohibitive transaction costs that, in the long term, both sides of the transaction were losers. If we determine, after a bloody fight, who is the slave and who is the master, we see that a slave loses because he does not get a fair payment for his labor, while the master loses in terms of productivity and personal security in comparison with the situation when a hired laborer gets compensated fairly.

America was built on a win/win principle of liberty and justice for all, and slowly but surely incorporated under this principle those groups that had been placed outside win/win. And it was done not out of the goodness of anyone’s heart, but because win/win really is what it claims to be, i.e. profitable for all. America is a country where everybody could come and become a citizen, where everyone could own land, where every race and every creed was eventually incorporated – and this is the source of America’s great strength.

By comparison, today 10% of French citizens are Muslim, and yet no national politician and not one Mayor is Muslim. Since Rwanda is populated by two major tribes, it is natural for Rwandans to think that this is one tribe too many, an idea that caused a million deaths during a period of three months. The world is moving towards win/win, but it is not there yet.

The problem with George W. Bush’s policy in Iraq is that he assumed that the idea of win/win has been accepted everywhere and that people strive to build a win/win society. But it is not true. Yanomami people, hunters-gatherers who live in the Amazon rain forest, wear no clothes, and yet, it does not mean that they want a Brooks Brothers suit. This is not to say, I hasten to clarify, that a Brooks Brothers suit is bad, it simply means that the Yanomami do not want it. And it is wrong to assume that the word 'Yanomami' stands for "have not got a credit card", "nudist" or "I'd rather dress casually", as it actually means human being. An important lesson here: no suit, and yet people still consider themselves human beings, with a clear idea as to how they should live and what to wear. It is likely that Yanomami will offer strong resistance to the idea of wearing a suit, no matter how good it is.

Does it mean that America should abandon the rest of the world to its own devices? No, it does not mean that. But American intervention should be gradual, respectful, cooperative, and clearly beneficial.

The last condition is the most important one, because the win/win system that we are trying to impose is very threatening and disruptive. Look, since there are no losers under a win/win interaction, it follows that there are no winners as well (a winner being someone who won over someone else); and if there are no winners it follows that all participants in a win/win interaction are losers. So, by offering a win/win system we are in fact offering to turn everyone into a loser, and people do not want that! Since I know I may have caused your head to spin, let me try again. Who is the winner in a win/win interaction? One party of the interaction has improved his situation over what it was before, that is, he is a winner over himself as he was prior to the interaction. And so are the other participants: they used to be worse off, now they are better off, so they are winners.

But this is not how the world defines a win! For a winner to be declared there needs to be a bloodied loser, or else it is not a win. A winner is defined as someone who defeated some other person.

America says, "Today you ran a hundred meter dash faster than yesterday, so you are a winner. You combated your inner resistance and won over yourself". The rest of the world says. "You are not a winner unless you run faster than others. Tie their legs, steal their running shoes, poison them, scare them so that they won't run!"

Win/win thus is a great challenge. There is nothing harder than to overcome yourself, and if you fail, you have nobody else to blame. Also, there is nobody to lord over and nobody’s suffering to see; here the question is, "If so, from what do you derive pleasure?" Win/win is a dictatorship of opportunity (which is limitless) over ability (which is limited, if not severely limited). Win/win is a cruel society that recognizes talent, and thus exists for the benefit of (a few) talented people, causing great suffering to the rest of us, should (and this is very important) we choose to become envious.

Take Jennifer Lopez as an example. She poses in a bikini, she sings, she has a thriving career and earns millions. What an affront to those who cannot pose in a bikini and can’t sing! Jennifer should wear a long black robe that hides the forms, cover her face, she should not talk unless spoken to, and spend her days serving tea to her husband. Now, that would be a boon to the millions of women whose bodies are not that shapely, so lose/lose has a point here.

Lose/lose gives the people the right they cherish most: the right to blame others for their own failure, and people are willing to fight and die for this right. Take the profession of composing music. There once was a Mozart, and now the challenge is to write something that Mozart would approve of. Shostakovich is one of very few composers who accomplished that. It is the same with poetry. There once was a Shakespeare, so now you need Anne Sexton or Robert Frost. But who could rise to such heights? Very few people. Lose/lose offers a solution. Get a set of drums, find a rhyme to the word "motherfucka" – and a rapper is born. Why take the profession of musician away from the masses?

We see that win/win is actually a dictatorship of those who can over those who cannot. Scarier still, it is a dictatorship of who I should be over who I am. When you are on a tennis court with Venus Williams, you know you have no chance of winning. But lose/lose is a democracy: when you wrap women head to toe, all of them are equally attractive.

Now, what does America try to impose on the Iraqis? Does America want to grant the Iraqis new opportunities (that they may not be ready to take advantage of) or does America want to take away their cherished excuse for failing to succeed?

It is a beautiful day in Iraq, and Shiites are gathering to honor their Prophet. They march down the street beating themselves with bunches of bicycle chains, pounding their chests, screaming. And then an American soldier comes up to them saying, "Why are you flagellating yourselves? Look, your backs are black and blue, you are bleeding. How will you go to work tomorrow? Let’s go watch some baseball, listen to music, try to meet girls in a bar." There is a huge miscommunication here.

Americans live their lives hoping that things will get better, but people in the Third World live their lives hoping things will not get worse. America has good intentions, but for the Iraqis it would take a total change in perception to recognize them as such.

George W. Bush's America is too good for the world, but unfortunately we cannot live elsewhere, so the situation calls for some tactical display of modesty, or else the world will conclude that Americans are too stupid to see the rest of the world for what it is.

Matthew Maly

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You may have wanted to know the REAL reason that 'Friends' has been taken off the airwaves. The 'official' reason is that the show's makers wanted to quit before the show became too stale.

The truth is rather more sinister.

In Lyle, the California Court of Appeal held that creative discussions in which writers of the popular sitcom Friends developed ideas and created scripts could constitute sexual harassment of individuals listening to the sometimes bawdy banter of the writers.

So now we know.

[Thanks to Virginia Postrel for the link.]

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Wealthy property tycoon, Will Hutton, is having himself a right old grumble today.

He is angry because other people are not paying enough tax and it is all the fault of those wretched Americans:

Equally, would our readiness to stand by progressive taxation have been so weakened without the view from the US that high rates of income tax on the rich are morally and economically wrong?

We had Mrs Thatcher, but arguably her dominance in British politics would have been less secure had it not been for the succour she took from American policies and conservative ideas. Britain is not a slave to American influences, but it cannot ignore the international common sense which the US more than any other nation shapes.

But, and lest anyone think that Mr Hutton is mindlessly anti-American, salvation is at hand. If US Conservatives have crippled the British left then American socialists can help them to cast away their crutches and enable them to walk tall again:

But opinion is moving. My bet remains that it will carry John Kerry to the White House - just. Of equal importance is the fact that neo-conservatism is on the defensive and that American liberalism has its best chance to regain ground for the first time in a generation.

It is not just American politics that could be transformed by Iraq, but our own. To believe in universal rights and fair societies might become respectable again.

Ergo, Mr Hutton believes these things are not respectable now.

For the most part, this is standard, nay boilerplate, Sunday fare for Guardianistas. Something to be to scanned in approvingly over a nut roast washed down with a steaming pot of fair-trade, dolphin-friendly, non-judgmental eco-coffee.

But if his regulars are unable to appreciate the sumptuous irony here then I can because Mr. Hutton is a member of that peculiar class of British metropolitan scribblers who are forever bewailing what they see as American dominance of our economy and culture and demanding that we look to Europe for inspiration. Yet Mr. Hutton feels himself unable to make the case for socialism without the bulwark of a Democrat President in the Whitehouse and notwithstanding the fact that Europe is a social democrat lock-in.

I think the truth is that Mr Hutton has lost the capacity to make the case for 'universal rights and fair societies' under any circumstances. But if he insists on blaming Ronald Reagan and George Bush for this descent into rhetorical impotence, then that is just fine by me.

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Although transhumanism is a broader church than libertarianism, it does approach many issues from a similar background: challenging current obstacles that prevent individuals from deciding that they wish to fully benefit from the range of cutting edge technologies that are now moving from speculation to experimentation. Like all movements, it has many variations, from those who champion pragmatic, short-term, measures to those who take a more visionary stance, dwelling upon the joys of uploading.

The United Kingdom has always provided a sympathetic culture and activists for transhumanism, notably its libertarian variant, extropianism. However, after the early 1980s, there does not appear to have been any group within the United Kingdom, which could organise and focus the efforts of likeminded individuals to provide an alternative voice to those organisations that wish to retard technological progress and promote the precautionary (reactionary?) principal.

In the last few two years, people interested in transhumanism have been meeting on a monthly basis in London and listening to guest speakers on various subjects. This social exercise, called Extrobritannia, has proved extraordinarily successful at providing links and full kudos to its founder, Fabio, who continues to put in a determined effort to engage a series of strong speakers. Past speakers have included Nick Bostrom, who argues that we may live in a computer simulation, Aubrey de Grey, a gerontologist at Cambridge (whose interview with Glenn Reynolds can be accessed here) and Alex Ramonsky, a wearables experimentalist and neurohacker (in the lexicon).

Most of the regulars to these meetings have become increasingly concerned at the influence of groups inimical to the development and application of technologies beneficial to humanity, whether they be environmentalists or bioconservatives. To combat these trends and to provide an alternative voice, we have decided to set up the UK Transhumanist Association as a non-profit organisation that will, hopefully, publicise and act as a coordinator for interested parties within the United Kingdom that can recognise the benefits of current and future developments within science. The papers were signed today.

At the moment, the UK Transhumanist Association is an embryonic organisation, with ambition rather then experience, but there is a role that needs to be filled.