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]

Likely delays over next few days…

Approving comments that have attracted the pitiless attentions of Smitebot, a creature of tireless vigilance and limited brain, may take rather longer than usual over the next few days.

Tomorrow the primary bio-mechanical component of the intermediating data analysis buffer is going in for significant repairs once again.

As we say on the internetz… brb

Smitebot’s meatbits…

…have been rather unwell lately, hence it has taken rather longer than usual to get comments approved if they have aggro’ed smitebot. Do not be concerned if you have no idea what this means

Editorial Pantheon announcement

Due to technical difficulties – we ran out of elves powering the blog – there will be a ‘reduced service’ on the blog. We’ll be back in full form as soon as possible.

In praise of the bailouts and redistribution of wealth

It has been clear to me for some time that support for capitalist wealth creation was no longer acceptable. The foolishness of our Austrian economic based opposition to massive politically directed transfers of ordinary people’s money to failed bankers, non-viable unionised car makers and anyone else who has political connections is clearly futile. This is the way of the future and we might as well get used to it while there is still any real money left to be redistributed. Let the printing presses roll and lets re-inflate that credit bubble! Fly me to the moon, my darling, fly me to the moon… on a massive gravity defying credit bubble!

As a consequence, as soon as I can get our technical guru to make the changes, we will be changing the name of this blog to ObamaBrownData, not as catchy as Samizdata I grant you, but it more fully represents the paradigm shift that all thinking people have now undergone and this blog is no exception. The world is rotating around the Gordon Brown/Barak Obama Axis now. So please all of you… go rotate.

We must learn to accept the wisdom and judgement of our political masters, sanctified by democratic processes, and realise that we are all dependent on the regulatory welfare state now. I will be signing up for as many state aid programmes as I can find and anyone who wants to advise me how to get on the gravy train, please let me know. All these years denying myself the largesse of our beneficent Big Brother has left me with a poor grasp of how to best benefit from the system. As Frederic Bastiat said, “The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else”, well everyone will include me now… and the Samizdatistas… or Obamabrownistas as we will now be known.

Point me to the trough, I repent my foolish ways and have a lot of catching up to do.

CMS switchover

There may be an interruption to the blog-flow/disturbance in the force as our switch over to a new CMS is imminent… hopefully.

Then again…

Our migration to the new CMS will not happen until next weekend, so you can enjoy your fix of spleenic rants and pro-liberty disgruntlements throughout the weekend uninterrupted.

We felt it was better to get it right than do it fast… plus I am told the stars will be more favourably aligned next weekend.

A possible interruption to the rant-flow at Samizdata.net

This weekend, if all goes well, the bloated monstrosity that is Samizdata’s back-end, all 11,000+ articles and 182,000+ comments (hopefully) will get dumped into a new CMS.

I fully expect all manner of server burps, devoured articles and comments and sundry debugging issues will crop up but we will try to keep the disruption to our crazed rants and your edification to a minimum. Wish us luck.

Samizdata just had a near death experience

As you might have noticed, the Samizdata server crapped out in a major way… and just to make it menthol, we also lost all our back-ups after 24th September (quite how that happened is still a bit unclear).

Well at least I had a separate set of back-ups also made by someone else, so no problem, thinks I… so imagine my happiness when I discover that the back-up back-up server crapped out some time ago and we were not in fact being backed up. That would have been nice to know.

I will be manually reconstructing the posts as best I can from the full RSS feeds.

Oh joy.

Needless to say I shall be setting up some sort of full site backup myself now.

As requested… a Samizdata facebook group

As I have had several people ask, I have set up a Samizdata Facebook group.

Now all I have to do if figure out what to do with it as I am new to Facebook.

Full XML feed

As requested, Samizdata.net now provides a full text XML feed for those who want it.

Immediate assistance needed

The newly minted high-school graduate daughter of a co-worker is on walkabout in Europe and due to a train strike in Italy is about to end up at Gatwick in the wee hours. Her father is trying to find some place for her to stay.

Any suggestions on places she could find a room at perhaps 3am in London are welcome. Any of our Samizdata staff awake over there still?

Server woes

Apologies for the sluggishness of the site recently, we have been under concerted attack from spammers.