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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The possible tenth planet, 2003 UB313, which takes 540 years to circle the sun, in a highly eccentric orbit, has now acquired a satellite. The new moon was discovered two months after 2003 UB313 by the Keck observatory on September 10th and the findings will be published tomorrow. The existence of a moon ensures that Xena will be seriously considered as a tenth planet, since it has the mass to acquire orbiting bodies.
“Since the day we discovered Xena, the big question has been whether or not it has a moon,” Michael Brown, of the California Institute of Technology, said in a statement. “Having a moon is just inherently cool — and it is something that most self-respecting planets have, so it is good to see that this one does too.”
The possible 10th planet moves in a highly eccentric orbit, tilted some 45 degrees above the orbital plane of the other planets. Its orbit is also elliptical, zooming in as close as 3.5 billion miles from the sun and moving out to as far as 9 billion miles away.
And, as you know, the self-respecting companion of Xena, could only have been called Gabrielle.
If Nazi Germany was fascism by radio, New Labour is the corporate state by television.
Colin MacCabe, writing in the Observer, on why he has left the Labour Party.
I realise that Samizdata is not really for this, but what follows is what is on my mind. The woes of politics, economics, life (i.e. other people’s lives), etc., can wait. My question is: does anyone know of an online source – preferably a blog – of advice about how to make a blog running on/under/with “Expression Engine” work better than it does now?
I offer no links in this posting, other than to the ailing blog in question, because links is what I want, rather than what I have.
My personal blog is now facing serious problems. First, I do not know how to make my monthly archives contain everything written during that month. You merely get the top few postings. And second, the process of uploading pictures has stopped working, without anything resembling an explanation:
A problem was encountered while attempting to upload your file.
Not helpful.
Third, in general, first really, the list of things you can tweak and twiddle when you look in the “Admin” section of the control/input system, or anywhere else in among all that stuff for that matter, consists entirely of things that could mean absolutely anything, and consequently, to me, mean absolutely nothing. Where do I find how to increase the number of postings shown in each monthly archive? It is impossible even to guess, and so far I have found nothing on the subject, despite several hours of looking.
Because the blog still is not working properly, I have not been able to get out of the “here is something silly just so as there is something up today” mode, and to start doing serious thinking and serious posting. I like trivia, from time to time. But not all the time.
My problems are caused by my opinions about how my blog should look. I think my blog should look good. I often write about the look of things, which is why I often want to put up photos, right next to what I have written. A blog that is one of those blog standard template thingies would not suffice for these purposes. I want something that looks a bit special, like the things I often like to write about.
What I really need to learn of is a blog where Expression Engine users ask each other questions and where clever Expression Engine show-offs or would-be Expression Engine paid consultants provide show-off and expert answers. Any Expression Engine experts in the London area would be especially useful to learn about. I do have someone helping me quite a lot, but that someone works funny and numerous hours at something else, and is not omniscient. A group blog just might be omniscient round the clock, as near as makes no difference. But is there one?
By the way, please (I cannot compel this but I can beg) do not turn any comments on this into an argument/celebration about how to upload photos to something else, like Flickr. My picture problem is uploading pictures into an Expression Engine blog posting. I want pictures on my blog. Pictures somewhere else as well is not now my problem.
If I cannot solve my problems with Expression Engine, which basically means finding a person or people who can help me solve my problems with Expression Engine, then I will stop using it. I only used Expression Engine in the first place because I was told that Samizdata was going to switch to it, which it has yet to do.
Bloggingwise, it has not been my year.
UPDATE Wednesday October 5th: Expression Engine is not to blame! Repeat: Expression Engine is not to blame! I am still confused by it, but I am confused by everything computational. I am now busy concocting a slightly longer version of this to put up at Samizdata, but meanwhile I attach this to the original posting. If you publicly denounce a product, and it turns out to be blameless, you must say so, and in a blog it is possible to say it right next to where you did the original trashing. So: sorry Expression Engine! Hope you are still in business. When I have done the longer posting, I will add the link forward to it from here.
The Latham Diaries
Mark Latham
Melbourne University Press, 2005
Mark Latham was a young idealistic figure when he joined the Australian Labour Party in 1979; within a decade he had become a Mayor of the Sydney suburb of Liverpool. In 1994, he became a federal MP, and in 2004 as leader of the Australian Labor Party, he lead the party to defeat in an Australian federal election. In January 2005, he retired from public life, and late last month, his ‘diaries’ were published.
The dairies are almost wholly political, covering his political career from his entry to Federal Parliament, although the published portions of the diary deal mostly with the period when Latham was a major figure in Australian public life, from 2002 to early 2005. → Continue reading: The revenge of Mark Latham
Meanwhile, you’ve got how many (admittedly very stupid) Australians in Indonesian prisons for something like 20 years on drug charges? So I guess the message here is kill some infidels and you’ll get two years with time off for good behavior, have a couple tabs of ecstasy on you and you’ll do 20 years in a third world prison.
– Hank Scorpio
Details are still sketchy, but there has been another terrorist outrage in Bali, targeting tourists in Jimbaran beach and Kuta beach. There seems to have been at least three separate explosions. As I write, the television is reporting that AP news agency is saying that 19 people have been killed and at least 51 more injured.
I love this story:
Historians have found that Britain’s first Indian restaurant was opened in 1809, in the midst of the Napoleonic wars and during the period in which Austen set Pride and Prejudice.
The Hindoostane Coffee House was established by Sake Dean Mahomed, an Indian-born entrepreneur, as a purveyor of Oriental food of the “highest perfection” in Marylebone, London, which at the time was a residential district for the well-off.
In my area of Pimlico, central London, there is an Indian restaurant right near my flat (aaahhh!) – said to be one of the oldest in London, dating back to the 1950s. But it appears that this now-established feature of culinary life has been going on since the age of Nelson, Wellington and William Wordsworth. An early example, in fact, of culinary globalization. It is not, in fact, all that surprising, since the desire for eastern spices and foodstuffs was an important economic incentive behind much of global trade at that time.
I can imagine how this story is going to change all those costume dramas set in the early 19th Century: “Pray excuse me sir X, but I am in urgent need of a chicken korma.”
Australian blogger Tex has an encounter with a former Green Party candidate, and learns a few things. Not least about economics, where Thom Lyons explains that:
Socialism is the syetem of choice is the most prosperous countries.
as well as several choice facts about 9/11, Cuba and the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Tex has more patience with this sort of character then I do. But the sad thing is that Lyons’ views are becoming more and more prevalent in Australian society.
Take my love, take my land, take me where I cannot stand.
I don’t care, I’m still free. You can’t take the sky from me.
Take me out to the black. Tell ’em I ain’t comin’ back.
Burn the land and boil the sea. You can’t take the sky from me.
Have no place I can be since I found Serenity
But you can’t take the sky from me.
– Joss Whedon
In these days of concern about violent Islamists running amok on our cities, it is always important to remember that other sources of violence can be found, such as the so-called animal rights campaigners:
A children’s nursery has become the latest target of animal rights threats, forcing it to stop providing child care vouchers to parents working for the animal testing group Huntingdon Life Sciences.
Leapfrog Day Nurseries, part of the education business Nord Anglia, said it was reviewing whether extra security measures were needed at its Peterborough nursery, which is nearest to the Life Sciences headquarters in Cambridgesire. It said it already employed “stringent security measures” to protect the children in its care.
Threatening a kiddies’ nursery. They must be so proud.
On a related matter, here is a fine essay taking the incoherent doctrine of animal rights apart. In my view, the doctrine is incoherent, although at the same time I think humans should seek to treat animals as kindly as possible, which is a very human-centric opinion to hold, of course.
“It is a irresistible to note that nearly everyone, including the wealth creator, is inclined to see the world of inner being, of the heart and soul, as being at odds with the commercial. Wealth creators seem shy of their success. It is often said that the Englishman has always preferred to be seen as a gentleman than as a creative, industrious or commercial person.”
Richard D. North, Rich is Beautiful, (page 199).
On a train from Manchester to Nottingham I was sitting at a table when I was joined (in Sheffield) by two academics from the University of Nottingham.
The two gentlemen talked (rather loudly) about the internal affairs of their department (which seemed to be a ‘social policy’ department, at least the term ‘social policy’ was used) and their nice trips to various European nations and to Australia, New Zealand and Japan.
What struck me was the total lack of interest in ideas that the academics showed – they both boasted of using the same talk again and again, and neither cared whether their talks represented the truth or made any contribution to knowledge.
I only spoke once. One of the academics was boasting of his trip to the “biggest city in New Zealand”, but could not remember the name of the place – so I told him it was called Auckland. But later he seemed to be under the impression that he was talking about the capital of New Zealand – so he may have meant Wellington.
For the rest of the time I just sat there in the hope that some sign of interest in ideas would be shown by either man, but it was not.
I remembered Professor R. of the Politics Department of the University of Nottingham. Professor R. had always been interested in ideas – although I can not say that I had always agreed with him.
Once at a conference in London I had expressed the fear that local councils would use the introduction of the Community Charge (the “Poll Tax”) as an opportunity to increase spending – and blame the bill on the new system (my own position was that a local sales tax would be the least bad option – as people could at least vote with their feet and shop in the cheapest areas thus, perhaps, forcing down the level of the tax).
Professor R. had replied that I was too cynical and that most politicians met well, they were just guided by mistake ideas. As my own view was that most politicians (and many other groups of people) were scum, our difference of opinion became quite sharp. Perhaps my anger was due to Professor R. reminding me of my father – a man who was betrayed so many times and yet maintained a strange (at least strange to me) faith in human beings.
Some years later (after some “modernization” of academic life) Professor R. killed himself.
As I have said he was man who was interested in ideas and valued them, but perhaps he had too much faith in human beings (just as, perhaps, I have too little faith in people).
I miss people like Professor R., they thought that other people were like themselves (and they are not), but the world would be a better place if they were correct and people (especially academics) were really honest and dedicated seekers after truth.
Still what would have I had heard had the two academics had been interested in ideas? The latest plan to reform the Welfare State – yet another pattern for the deckchairs on the Titanic?
Or (if the academics had been economists) the claim that the best way to promote prosperity was to “reduce interest rates and stimulate demand”.
I have even heard libertarians talking as if investment did not have to based on real savings ( fiat money and credit bubbles performing this function instead), and as if prosperity was based on consumption (rather than on work to produce goods and services of value to human beings). The madness of the boom bust cycle being presented as what “all serious economists” believe (as a columnist in the “Times” newspaper put it – referring to his idea that Germany’s economic situation could be improved by issuing more money “stimulating demand”).
What is worse? People who are not interested in ideas, or works of political philosophy, economics (and other subjects) that are filled with absurd nonsense and seeing this nonsense repeated in so many places, from leading universities to television and the newspapers?
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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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