We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
I could not dig; I dared not rob:
Therefore I lied to please the mob.
Now all my lies are proved untrue
And I must face the men I slew.
What tale shall serve me here among
Mine angry and defrauded young?
The problem is not that the BBC is on the wrong wavelength, it is that it is on any wavelength at all. That in this day and age a supposedly first world country has a tax funded state broadcast institution is simply absurd.
Poverty is a solved problem – all they have to do is abolish taxes and regulations which cripple those intelligent, capable, and responsible men and women and destroy their productive capacity, then stand back and watch the economy boom.
Politicians can’t reform Social Security because they can’t talk about it honestly, and they can’t talk about it honestly because the median voter doesn’t want to admit a basic fact: Grandpa is an embezzler.
Unlike terrestrial radio transmissions, satellite transmissions come from a point source in the sky. One must point their antenna in the right direction to receive such signals. Different people may launch satellites in different positions and broadcast without interference. The case for licensing radio spectrum is alreadyweak. There can be no argument for the need for a third party to license satellite radio spectrum.
In satellite television, the satellites are privately owned and launched by private space vehicles.
And yet in the UK one needs a broadcasting license from Ofcom to squirt photons encoded with television signals towards the Earth from space.
In addition, Ofcom gets to decide who is “fit and proper” to hold such a license. There is no definition of “fit and proper”. This is the rule of the whim of bureaucrats.
This is good, because it shows how reasonable most people consider their government’s existence and demands to be – and because it shows how misled those people are. (I have put this under the Humour category, but I find it rather depressing. Those who can be emotionally detached about these things may laugh, though.)
The current U K problem seems to be that despite the growing conflicts there of principles with interests, there is no “grass roots” movement nor electorate concerns that no election party is strong enough to represent principles.
I found myself entranced last week by a collection of art at The Gershwin Hotel in New York. Entitled Welcome to the Panopticon, the exhibition of paintings focuses on the capture of our daily lives, and reflects on the impact of surveillance. The artist, Wayne Toepp, writes of the work on his own website:
This body of work engages the twin notions of watching and being watched. I am examining images collected from the continual data stream of the expanding security environment that we move through in our daily comings and goings. The surveillance state has indeed arrived, attended by an ever more rapidly diminishing sphere of privacy.
…If art is a process of pointing, it must register and account for that which it is pointing toward. I have chosen to examine, at some length, images culled from actual surveillance video because I would like the viewer to register both the disintegration of privacy and the implications of surveillance technology in the current political climate.
Click thumbnail to view larger version
It is refreshing to see modern art that is not simply an exercise in provoking for the sake of it, or trying to elevate offense to an art of its own, but displaying a surreal sort of beauty while leading the viewer to think and feel about something that matters. See more in Wayne Toepp’s portfolio.
The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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