We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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In another perilous time – 1918 – Lord Haig wrote of Lord Derby: “D is a very weak-minded fellow I am afraid and, like the feather pillow, bears the marks of the last person who has sat on him.” It’s subtler than that with Kerry: you don’t have to sit on him; just the slightest political breeze, and his pillow billows in the appropriate direction. His default position is the conventional wisdom of the Massachusetts Left: on foreign policy, foreigners know best; on trade, the labour unions know best; on government, bureaucrats know best; on defence, graying ponytailed nuclear-freeze reflex anti-militarists know best; on the wine list, he knows best.
-Mark Steyn, getting stuck in to the Democrats’ truly unimpressive presidential candidate. (This is worth reading, too).
No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
– Lord Salisbury (1877)
There are plenty worse [than Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan] in the nation’s upper house – John Kerry, Edward Kennedy, Christopher Dodd, Claiborne Pell, Alan Cranston and the appalling Howard Metzenbaum, to name just six.
– P.J. O’Rourke, Parliament of Whores (1991)
N.B. Top of the list of shame!
All the extravagance and incompetence of our present government is due, in the main, to lawyers.They are responsible for nine-tenths of the useless and vicious laws that now clutter the statute-books, and for all the evils that go with the vain attempt to enforce them. Every Federal judge is a lawyer. So are most Congressmen. Every invasion of the plain rights of the citizen has a lawyer behind it. If all lawyers were hanged tomorrow, and their bones sold to a mah jong factory, we’d all be freer and safer, and our taxes would be reduced by almost a half.
– H.L. Mencken.
This is the New York Times quote of the day, from Stephen Hawking, he of the technologically enhanced vocal chords:
“I’m sorry to disappoint science fiction fans, but if information is preserved there is no possibility of using black holes to travel to other universes.”
Until now I have taken it for granted that any idea that black holes might ever make a contribution to long haul transport was black pudding in the sky. But now I am not so sure.
I do not know exactly what Hawking means about information being preserved, just as I am seldom completely clear what he means about most things, but the rest of this quote reads so very like those it-will-never-float it-will-never-fly only-six-computers-will-ever-be-needed electric-guitar-groups-will-never-catch-on prophecies which are periodically gathered together into anthologies of Things They Wish They Had Not Said, that I suddenly find myself becoming more optimistic about the possibility that one might one day be able to hail a Black Hole Cab and take a trip to another universe.
Today, watching television often means fighting, violence, and foul language – and that’s just deciding who gets to hold the remote control.
– Donna Gephart
A lie can run round the world before the truth has got its boots on.
– Terry Pratchett, The Truth
I smell blood so i lie and smear chocolate lather on your bare butt after drunks lick a frantic puppy’s bitter, delicate love leg but i say he would use weak honey spray as purple breast wax & drive a smooth finger from my sausage to get juice with enormous power with a delirious boy lusting mad feet sweat through thousands of rusty and elaborate meat gardens yet easy you chant only ugly behind raw produce in their beauty ships so why not sit your shiny white apperatus and crush the tiny hairy symphony of void summer death petalness and shake your luscious tongue you repulsive mother of true peach fluff who said the milk never worshiped the pink rock as i did and my fiddle is singing to drool.
Blogs cannot change the way newspapers are written, but they can change the way people read them
An armed individual who just wishes to be left the hell alone will last
longest under which system?
a. Communism
b. A corrupt Democracy that is racing to embrace Fascism
c. Anarchy
Where liberty is, there is my country
– Benjamin Franklin
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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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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