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Three reasons actually: One engagement party (between two Samizdatistas, no less), one St. George’s day party and a party of Samizdatistas in France… We lured the famous Dissident Frogman away from his Northern stronghold to meet up with us south of the French heart of Darkness for much hilarity at the expense of the French establishment and a great deal of good food. April 24th, 2005 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
 According to The Australian, Richard Branson wants an Australian site for his new suborbital space planes. That in itself would not be particularly unusual: others before him have seen and considered the Australian launch advantage.
It may not have done so for many of you, but this sets off tinkling bells and flashing lights for me. If you are at all close to the space industry you will know there is an excellent near equator site in Australia where there has long been interest for a Spaceport. I have not been following it much lately, but I do remember there was an intent to launch Russian rockets from there. The current status is neither here nor there: Australia is the only Anglospherian country with existing space infrastructure and near equatorial lands. When a spaceship takes off it gets an extra boost from the Earth’s rotational velocity. The further from the equator you are, the less advantage you get. Imagine you were at the North Pole. The Earth is rotating your spaceship on the pad once every 24 hours and when you launch, your engines have to supply 100% of the velocity required for orbit. If you are at an intermediate geographical location, like KSC at Cape Canaveral, the rotating planet is moving your spaceship at a significant eastward velocity before it even leaves the ground. If you are at the equator, you are already traveling at a rate of 1/24 the Earth’s circumference per hour. An equatorial or near-equatorial site is ideal for a first generation orbital spaceship . It gives a starting velocity of a little under a half km/sec eastwards on your fully loaded spaceship before it even leaves the ground. This is a big win. You need roughly 7.5 km/sec to make orbit: you may think of the Earth’s equator as a free, reuseable first stage. So. Inference one: Branson is already looking ahead to orbital flights. Now notice he is considering more than one spaceport location. He is not talking of abandoning the US launch site in the Mojave. He wants to add another site for suborbital fares. He would have two sites at which he could operate suborbital space ship take offs and landings. Branson is in the airline business and knows better than I what the size of the market is for people who want to take a short suborbital tourist hop… versus the number of high value business people who would pay extraordinary fares to reach the antipodes in 45 minutes. British Air refused to sell him the Concordes, but Richard might just laugh last and best. Inference two: I expect we will at some point see a proof of concept flight of a Rutan vehicle which leaves the Mojave on a suborbital intercontinental ballistic trajectory and lands in Australia. If he has a vehicle capable of carrying 6 paying passengers for tourism, that same vehicle with a lone pilot can probably boost onto a trans-Pacific trajectory. Branson, Rutan and Allen are smart cookies. They are not going to advertise their plans ahead of time. But if you are going to go into space and make it pay, this is the way to do it: Step 1) Fund a suborbital test vehicle and get it partly paid for by winning the X-Prize. [DONE] Step 2) Build a suborbital joy ride vehicle that mostly pays for itself going up and down. [IN PROGRESS] Step 3) Fly the first intercontinental suborbital flight with that vehicle in a stripped down single pilot mode. Step 4) Build a slightly larger vehicle that mostly pays for itself via trans-Pacific flights. Step 5) Use that American built vehicle in a stripped down, single pilot mode to fly from an equatorial base into orbit. Perhaps it will be necessary to build a special vehicle to deal with higher re-entry heat loading, but there are now two revenue streams on line, not to mention Bob Bigelow’s $50M America’s Space Prize. Step 6) Add another revenue stream. Sell astronaut transport services to NASA about the time the Shuttles are sent off to museums. Perhaps also sell delivery services to Bob Bigelow’s inflatable orbital facility for yet another stream. Step 7) Earth orbit is “half way to anywhere”. The solar system is now your oyster. As they say in the tech business, “It’s a plan!” April 23rd, 2005 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
A review written by Keith Windschuttle has appeared in National Review. The book reviewed is The Anglosphere Challenge by James C. Bennett. (N.B. updated link allows access to US, British or Canadian Amazon and lets you read some of the book content.) I liked the book and liked the review and want to talk about them. Let me start with a disclosure: I have biffed many an email to and fro with Jim Bennett, and have had the pleasure of meeting him once at one of Perry’s blogger parties. The ease with which that came to pass is of interest in itself. I cannot exactly remember how I went from hearing my husband say, ‘some bloke on the radio was talking about something called the “Anglosphere”‘, to talking to said bloke at a party. But it was not difficult and the internet was involved at all stages. There is nothing new about an interlocking network of informal communities (sustained by the exchange of letters) that include authors and people interested in their ideas, and whose existence is enlivened by the odd party. However what is new is that the ease of formation of such micro-communities has vastly increased. Their transaction costs have decreased. People exchanging their writings (including but not limited to blogging) and ending up at the same parties are found at one end of an axis against which are plotted possible meanings of the word “community.” The quantity changing as one moves along the axis could be informality, size, fluidity, non-exclusiveness (in the sense that you can belong to many of them) or voluntariness: for any of these variables the resulting spectrum would still show the same types of community appearing in the same order. Libertarians by definition like the fact that email-swapping, partygoing micro-communities are voluntary, and they also tend to have a preference of taste for the fact that they are small, fluid, and non-exclusive. → Continue reading: Evolving political forms and common culture: the Anglosphere April 22nd, 2005 | 74 comments - (Comments are closed)
“If you really want to improve the lives of the poorest, forget all this ‘kumbaya socialism’ – which is a cocktail of bad economics and bad theology, held together by self-righteous candle-waving.” April 22nd, 2005 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
Not to be outdone by this bold commitment, the other main parties hastened to make what they believe are equally appealing promises to the electorate. The Liberal Democrats have pledged to increase intelligence if they are elected. A press release issued by their head office (which nobody can actually find) claimed that “average IQs have slipped dramatically under this government”. They promise that the Liberal Democrats are determined to close the “mental wealth gap” by extracting neurons from the brains of very clever people and injecting them into the brains of stupid ones. Meanwhile, the Conservatives have promised to make people taller. Speaking outside Central Office, some chinless mediocrity said that their proposals would help everyone under 5′ 10″ and would result in an average height gain of 3 inches. The Greens have poured scorn on the Conservative proposals claiming that the reason that some people are shorter than others is because tall people are hogging more than their fair share of growth hormones. A Green spokesman..er woman…er thingy, said that the Greens are committed to a programme of genetic redistribution. So the race for election of May 5th is hotting up and if you don’t vote you could well miss out on all these good things. April 21st, 2005 | 69 comments - (Comments are closed)
Glenn Reynolds links to this article saying that the French government has put its support behind a law allowing the Chinese military to attack Taiwan as well as end the EU embargo of arms to China. So let me get this straight. France, a democracy (sort of) decides to let a communist dictatorship – China – acquire the necessary means and legal clearance to attack a democratic neighbour that has posed no threat or problem whatsoever to France (apart from cheap electronics, maybe). I guess that is what is known as nuanced foreign policy. Way to go, Jacques! April 21st, 2005 | 63 comments - (Comments are closed)
Our standing orders on Samizdata are to write not just about certain specific areas of thought and policy, but about what is on our minds. I take this as an invitation to stray beyond the obvious and beyond our core expertises, such as they are. Not everything here is even supposed to make complete sense. In that spirit, let me tell you about two pieces of writing which, taken together, struck me as interesting. They are pretty interesting even separately, but together they get even more interesting. Anyway, see what you think. The first piece of writing is a book called The Cradle of Thought, by Peter Hobson, who is an expert on autism, but not only on autism. Hobson’s subject matter is not just the particular form of unusual thought and experience called autism, but also the light that this and other abnormalities throw on the processes of normal human thought. (One of the best ways to understand how something is supposed to work is to examine what happens when something or someone damages it or in some way interrupts its smooth working.) What comes across from this book is that thinking, of the sort that most of us do most of the time, is an intensely social thing. It starts not just with me thinking about that. It starts with me thinking about that by learning what you already think about that. What you (typically my mother) think(s) is the thing that gets me started with my thinking. So, if I am the sort of me who is especially disposed not to pay attention to what you (my mum) are (is) thinking, that changes how I think, about everything. I may become very expert, by default, about things, but remain permanently baffled by people, and in particular by the notion that other people have a point of view of their own which I can tune into, and by the idea that other people are accordingly very different from other mere things. This book seems to be quite well known and quite highly regarded, so there is no shortage of further verbiage to read about it should you feel the urge, now that you have heard a little of my point of view about it. The other piece of writing was this article and related discussion, about dogs, and about the differences between dogs and such animals as wolves and foxes, which I got to via the ever interesting and stimulating Arts & Letters Daily. → Continue reading: Autism, dogs, etc. April 21st, 2005 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
Only a wilful fool would dispute that racism moved from being the unremarkable default mainstream view in the western world to being a prejudice which scarcely dare speak its name. I would argue that this did not come about just because a few anti-discrimination laws got passed. A great many things are illegal and yet doing them does not put you ‘beyond the pale’ in polite society. In most circles lighting up a spliff or speeding or paying your builder/nanny/housekeeper in cash are matters of little or no account and few people would think less of you if they discovered you were doing so. Overt racism on the other hand has precisely that effect because regarding that there has been a cultural shift. To be a racist is not just wrong, it makes you a jackass in the eyes of others. Most racists are now more prone to keep their views to themselves, not because someone will call the cops and have them hauled off to a re-education camp, but because they can no longer safely assume others will share their meta-context. And so with that in mind, it may seem trivial to rail against people who display or wear images of Che Guevara but what is at stake is far more than a battle for mere tee-shirt space. The fact that a person wearing a Himmler or Hitler tee-shirt would attract scorn is quite appropriate, and so it is really quite intolerable that fans of the mass murderers of the left get to think images of their favoured mass murdering thug makes them look cool. Why just let that slide? Groups like the ‘animal rights’ activists PETA provide a fairly good example of ‘going to the culture’ with some success at portraying people who wear fur coats as wicked and getting that meme into the zeitgeist fairly effectively at least in the USA and UK (though rather less successfully elsewhere). So do not shrug off efforts to portray people who wear images of communist mass murderers as jackasses rather than ‘cool’ as wasted effort over something something of no account. Little things like this add up and if you believe, as I do, that the single biggest factor determining the triumph or defeat of liberty is a cultural expectation of liberty, then fighting for the cultural issues really does matter. And if the lumpen wearing the Che Guevara tee-shirt does not even know who he was, as will often be the case, then tell him in no uncertain terms so that next time he looks at his pile of shirts, perhaps he will think twice before putting it on and maybe, just maybe, look at other people wearing those vile tee-shirts a bit differently. 
April 20th, 2005 | 57 comments - (Comments are closed)
I am due for a fascinating teleconference in 10 minutes, but I thought this Glenn Reynold’s post nicely illustrated a real blind spot for libertarians. We tend to be market- and economics-oriented, and any concentration of attention in one area creates blind spots in others. One of those blind spots has to do with the economically irrational but irreducibly human craving for non-material benefits in the form of status, recognition, etc.
I have a niggling sense that there is a lot more to be said on this subject, but duty calls. Go read the Instapundit post, and as always, be sure to click the concluding “Indeed.” April 20th, 2005 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
Selected research on bread:
Providing all the scientific support any nanny-stater will need to implement controls. April 20th, 2005 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
John K added a comment to the Rover over story here last week which Mark Holland liked so much that he reproduced it over at his blog in its entirety. I agree, and had in mind to do something similar here when I first read it. But now that Mark has already immortalised it, I will confine myself to reproducing the final enraged paragraph of what John K had to say about Stephen Byers:
So far so entertaining. We think Byers is a fool. We would. But then last Sunday evening, in the tube, I picked up a discarded copy of the Observer business section. And I later read, on its front page, this piece about the Rover debacle, which contained the following choice invective, also about Stephen Byers:
Something tells me that Byers will not actually pay anything, and incompetence by the standards of normal life is not the same as political incompetence, is it? So he may indeed make a political comeback. However, the fact that Byers is being trashed in the Observer makes me optimistic that this particular incompetent may have had his day. If so, then I guess he will have to go back to Polytechnic lecturing. If they’ll have him. April 19th, 2005 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
Three newspapers caught my attention today, in relation to what they had to say about the Conservative party. Mark Steyn in the Daily Telegraph pointed out that the Conservative party was not even arguing against the doctrines of social democracy and therefore could not complain with the fact that the forces of an ever larger government were going to win the general election in Britain. If one will not even argue one can not blame the people for siding with one’s opponents. Mr Richard Littlejohn in The Sun newspaper (sorry, not in on-line edition) also argued that timidness of the Conservatives would mean that they had no hope of victory. Finally the Financial Times had on its front page the fact that almost 7 out of 10 voters believed that the Conservative party would put taxes UP if elected to government. I believe that two things are wrong with the Conservative party. One is indeed the timid nature of its policies, as the Economist journal pointed out weeks ago the tax and spend policies of the Conservative and Labour parties are so similar as to be almost indentical. But it is not just a matter of policy, it is a matter of the arbitrary power of the leadership. In the late 1970’s (when the Conservative party was last out of government) many Conservatives showed interest in ideas, they visited the Institute of Economic Affairs, they set up research bodies of their own (such as the Centre for Policy Studies) they freely debated both the practical details of policy and the political principles on which policy should rest. All this has been much more muted in recent times. First, pressure was put on people to only say what the party wished them to say (and this pressure started long before the election campaign) and now first candidates and then an actual member of Parliament have been turned on – turned on for absurdly mild ‘crimes’. First a candidate was told he must stand down because he had been photographed with firearms (that did not even belong to him) in the background of the photograph – this in the party that once represented not just shooting for hunting but the British National Rifle Association and the Constitutional Club network (once stronger in Britian than in the United States). Then a candidate was told he must stand down because the socialist Guardian newspaper had attacked his use of the term creative destruction in relation to the public services. It did not matter that the candidate was simply quoting Joseph Schumpeter (the non Austrian school, Austrian economist). It was not a question of the leadership thinking that, say, Hayek and Mises were better economists than Schumpeter – the leadership of the Conservative party were not interested ideas at all. The Guardian had attacked, so the candidate must go. Then Mr. Flight a member of Parliament (whilst Parliament was still sitting) was told he would not be allowed to stand for Parliament as a Conservative again – regardless of the fact that his Constituency Association and the local voters supported him. His crime? Saying that he thought there was more scope for savings in government spending than the leadership had said. Mr Flight said nothing about ‘secret plans’, but he was not just removed from the Shadow Cabinet, – he was removed from the list of candidates for the Conservative party. It is this “list” that is the key problem. It is not a simple matter of Mr Howard (the leader of the Conservative party) being a bad man – no person should have the arbitary power to effectively expel someone from Parliament simply because they do not happen to like something they have said. It is as if President Bush could expel any Republican from the House of Representatives simply because they said that they thought that there was more scope for savings in government spending than President Bush has said. This arbitrary power of the leadership of the Conservative party did not use to be used liked this (so some fault does go to Mr Howard as an individual), but it is the power itself that must be removed if their is to be a real chance of an intellectual restoration of the Conservative party. The Conservative party was once called by its enemies the ‘stupid party’. Whatever the truth or falseness of this charge, a political party today that is uninterested in ideas, indeed expels anyone who shows an interest, has no chance of returning to power. April 19th, 2005 | 33 comments - (Comments are closed)
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