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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Thoughts here have turned towards what good news might consist of, what with most of the news from Iraq lately having been so bad. Do we really want the media to be dominated by the stuff? I mean, might good news not be rather … boring?
Personally, what I dislike is not bad news as such. It is the drawing of wrong conclusions from it. Yes, there has been a terrible flood in the Dominican Republic, and I want to be able to read the details of it. But this does not mean that all the people out there live all of their lives in a state of permanent Tidal Wave of Mud Terror. You think that is an exaggeration? Well, I was living in a hotel in Krakow for the first weekend of the Iraq War, the easy bit. All I had to learn about the war was BBC 24 hour news, and this was, as I am sure you all vividly remember, the exact mistake that the BBC made. Hey, here are some soldiers who have been ambushed! Ergo, Iraq is one Great Big Ambush. No, it was just an ambush, and actually, even I could deduce that, despite all the gloomy commentary, My Team was winning big. Here was a classic piece of good news that the BBC truly did misread and misreport as bad.
But unlike the good news of how well that war was actually going, a lot of good news is genuinely dull, compared to bad news. → Continue reading: Bad news and good news
Gotta give Matt Drudge credit for these back to back headlines:
Putin fights off ‘authoritarian’ charges…
Report: Russia Guards Told to Smile More…
A belated account of Mistaken Identity, a public meeting on ID cards that took place in London last week. Unfortunately, we missed it as we were in Geneva protesting against something else. Fortunately, Stand have recorded the event and Privacy International has the full address by the President of The Law Society.
Thanks to infinite ideas machine (link now added to the blogroll)
I dunno about you, but I was bored stiff. I was driving home from work when it came on the radio, and I damn near dozed off and drove into a light pole.
Sure, the delivery was that kind of Rotary Club tumpty-tump that we have come to expect from W, but really, substance aside, couldn’t the text have been a lot better? This is just mediocre writing, the kind of dull crap that I expect from a third-rate consulting firm, not from what should be the pinnacle of any writer’s career.
In this particular war, in which all the meaningful battles are being fought between the ears of Iraqis, Americans, and a handful of other nationalities, having such an ineffective communications team on our side is probably worth at least an armored division to the Islamonutters.
This is tragic. Truly tragic. In fact I am extremely surprised that David Carr has not had a chortle about it at least six hours ago:
Today a painful task will begin in Leyton, east London: picking through the remains of a devastating fire which destroyed a huge warehouse containing priceless works of art.
Many of the lost works are from the collection of Charles Saatchi. It is thought that they may include Jake and Dinos Chapman’s Hell.
Tracey Emin’s famous Everyone I Have Ever Slept With may be another: the tent appliquéd with the names of her past lovers was the star of the famous Royal Academy Sensation! exhibition and to many became emblematic of the endeavours of a generation of young British artists. “I don’t know what specific pieces have been lost,” Mr Saatchi said yesterday. “So far it has been a day of many rumours.”
The warehouse belonged to Momart, the country’s leading art handlers, who undertake storage and transport for the Tate, the National Gallery and Buckingham Palace, as well as Damien Hirst and Rachel Whiteread.
The confusion about which pieces have succumbed stems partly from Momart’s uncertainty about what was stored in the building, Mr Saatchi said. Work by Sarah Lucas, famed for substituting parts of the human body with poultry, fried eggs and vegetables in her pieces, was also feared to have been destroyed.
No no no. This was not “devastating”. This was an art happening. These people need to dispense with their outdated ways of seeing so-called “reality” and instead look at the world in a new way. This fire did not destroy, it merely moved some objects from one state of being to another … We need to think beyond “specific pieces” to the totality of life …
As for all this “uncertainty”, well, what I say is can one ever really be “certain” about anything? Surely we have learned by now not to seek an illusion of certainty in an inherently uncertain world. There is no certainty. There are only different ways of looking at things. We need to get away from the single point of view, the one fixed, bourgeois way of seeing everything, within one fixed frame … blah blah blah … etcetera etcetera etcetera … insert Carr-isms at will.
Sometimes Modern Art contrives a happening which really hits the spot and grabs the headlines. Sensational or what?
Although, I would advise Buckingham Palace to think about making other arrangements for its art transport needs.
The Satanic Gases
Patrick J. Michaels & Robert C. Balling
Cato Institute, Washington DC, 2000
Adapt or Die: the Science, Politics and Economics of Climate Change
Edited by Kendra Okonski
Profile Books, London 2003
Challenging Environmental Mythology: Wrestling Zeus
Jack W. Dini
SciTech Publishing Inc, Raleigh NC 27613
The Satanic Gases I found a somewhat difficult but reassuring book, published in 2000, so presumably not too out of date. In the overview at the beginning, the authors state: “Assuming a constant sun, we find that planetary surface warming should average around 1.3 degrees Celsius in the next century,” with twice as much warming appearing in winter as in summer (p. 3, 210), with warming occurring most at night (p. 137). Other mitigating features are that the tropics warm least (p. 182) and the coldest air-masses are warming most (p. 91), both according to observations and to modelling. Also, as is already known, higher carbon dioxide levels greatly benefit plant growth (Ch. 10). Some of these features will also be found in the other two books reviewed here.
The authors set out, in Ch. 11, p. 191-198, how government funding has strengthened the alarmist consensus, though they point out that any scientific paper denying it that gets past the rigorous peer review has greater impact. This is the silver lining” (p. 197), but it seems rather thin and faint, with the political opposition wielding, at the time of writing, a big vice-presidential stick (by Gore, p. 198). The public perception of what has been happening is also distorted by claims that anything in the way of bad (even unusually cold) weather can be put down to global warming. Clinton and Gore are guilty in this respect, Gore especially, with some over-the-top quotations included here (p. 198) from his Earth in the Balance.
The El Nino phenomenon (the periodical change from cold to warm masses of water arriving off the South American coast) has distorted temperature records, and sometimes not been taken into account (Fig. 5.5, p. 82). It is not related to global warming, having been in existence, and recognized, as a periodic effect long before the rise in carbon dioxide. This did not stop it being dragged into the debate as a symptom of global warming, all the same (p. 47). The alarmist Newsweek cover of 22 Jan 1996 (p. 140) the authors find “disappointing, to say the least” (p. 147) and “infamous” (p. 174). Some scares can be refuted: there are fewer hurricanes, less drought and more rain than there used to be – and that indeed, is consistent with computer modelling (Ch. 7). Underlying all the controversy is the problem of devising computer simulations which match the known observations which themselves must be disentangled from “contaminants” such as urbanisation which tends to overgrow land-based weather stations. → Continue reading: Climate change and other alarms
Here are two snippets of news from the BBC today.
Snippet one:
Train drivers’ union Aslef has suspended three of its officials after an alleged brawl at a barbecue at its north London offices.
The alleged incident involved general secretary Shaun Brady, assistant general secretary Mick Blackburn and president Martin Samways.
Snippet two:
A 14-year-old schoolboy has been arrested after a teacher was attacked, police have said.
The youngster was arrested after the incident at a school in Scarborough, North Yorkshire, on Friday 21 May.
He was later released on police bail pending further inquiries, a force spokesman added.
Police said the teacher, a 54-year-old man, was taken to hospital for a check-up after suffering swelling and bruising to his face.
Both of these events occurred in Britain. They prove beyond doubt that Britain is a continuous maelstrom of violence from one end of the country to the other.
We should get out now.
The Department of Homeland Security is on the verge of awarding the biggest contract in its young history for an elaborate system that could cost as much as $15 billion and employ a network of databases to track visitors to the United States long before they arrive.
The program, known as US-Visit and rooted partly in a Pentagon concept developed after the terrorist attacks of 2001, seeks to supplant the nation’s physical borders with what officials call virtual borders. Such borders employ networks of computer databases and biometric sensors for identification at sites abroad where people seek visas to the United States.
With a virtual border in place, the actual border guard will become the last point of defense, rather than the first, because each visitor will have already been screened using a global web of databases.
Visitors arriving at checkpoints, including those at the Mexican and Canadian borders, will face “real-time identification” — instantaneous authentication to confirm that they are who they say they are. American officials will, at least in theory, be able to track them inside the United States and determine if they leave the country on time.
Whoever wins the contract will be asked to develop a standard for identifying visitors using a variety of possible tools — from photographs and fingerprints, already used at some airports on a limited basis since January, to techniques like iris scanning, facial recognition and radio-frequency chips for reading passports or identifying vehicles.
Let’s hope that such a ‘high-concept’ plan will be above the ability of governments to organise such monumental projects. After all they say, hope springs eternal…
As old time readers surely know, I am a long time denizen of the L5 Society of yore and the National Space Society formed from its union with the National Space Institute of Werner von Braun. I chair one of the major committees of the society and so state up front I have a rather serious interest in the upcoming ISDC (International Space Development Conference).
With that out of the way… I’d like to invite anyone in the Oklahoma area (or anywhere in the world for that matter) to come along. Programming runs from Thursday this week until Monday (May 27-31). There are one day registrations for those who are too busy to attend the full event.
Speakers include:
- Oklahoma Lt. Gov. Mary Fallin, Chair of the Aerospace States Assn
- Melchor J. Antunano, M.D., MS, Director FAA Civil Aerospace Medical Institute
- Charles Chafer, CEO, Team Encounter, Humanity’s First Starship™ Solar Sails
- Fred Haise, Apollo 13 Astronaut, Space Shuttle Commander
- Gen. Ken McGill, Board Chairman, Oklahoma Space Industry Development Authority
- Dr Kenneth Money, Canadian Astronaut
- Courtney Stadd, Former NASA Chief of Staff
- Dr. Donald A. Thomas, Astronaut, ISS Program Scientist
- Rick Tumlinson, Founder, Space Frontier Foundation
- Prof. Robert Winglee, University of Washington, Department of Earth and Space Sciences, Mini-Magnetospheric Plasma Propulsion
- Dr. Robert Zubrin, President, Mars Society
as well as many others. You will have to skim the program to find them… or else just show up and register at the door. All are welcome.
If you do drop in, look for a harried guy in corporate battle armour (ie. a dark suit) running about the place. It will either be me or someone who will point you to me. You are welcome to say hello… but be prepared to do so on the run!
The UK government’s biometric ID card trial is gathering momentum with Glasgow the latest city to go live with iris, fingerprint and facial recognition testing. The nationwide trial aims to enrol 10,000 volunteers around the UK who will have their biometric details recorded and put on a chip in a mock smart card. Testing started in April in London and will run through until August.
Glasgow now joins London, Leicester and Newcastle in the project and a mobile unit will travel around other parts of the country including Wales and the Home Counties.
The project has been hit by some teething problems in pre-trial tests, which highlighted defects in collecting and reading some of the biometric data. Civil liberties and privacy groups this week also formed an alliance in opposition to the introduction of ID cards to the UK.
For an interesting insight into how the statist meme became so dominant, check out these comments by an Instapundit reader:
Perhaps the most pervasive way in which journalists are different from normal people is that journalists live in a world dominated by government, and they reflexively see government action as the default way to approach any problem.
. . . .
It’s no accident that for the most part, the news is dominated by people whose value is largely driven by how much publicity they receive: politicians, athletes and entertainers. The people who actually make the world work – people in private industry, rank-and-file government employees and conscientious parents – are largely invisible in the news, except when they’re unlucky enough to make one of the rare mistakes that reporters manage to find out about.
My reading of this is that the mainstream/elite media and the state sort of bootstrapped each other to the top of the pile, in classic one-hand-washes-the-other fashion.
The media propagated the statist meme because it was both easy and it elevated them to the degree that centralized media is parasitic (or perhaps symbiotic) with a centralized state.
The comments come just as yet another survey is released demonstrating that the denizens of American newsrooms are significantly more “liberal” (in the newfangled sense of the term, the one where the jackboot is made by Birkenstock) than the general public. Perhaps the best illustration of the whole dynamic is that a survey showing the media is significantly more hostile to President Bush than the general public went out under the title Press Going Too Easy on Bush.
You can’t make this stuff up. Now, I certainly have my beefs with the current President, but the self-appointed Fourth Estate has really gotten up my nose lately. They could play an important role in society, as a necessary feedback mechanism, but they have largely abrogated that role, in my view. Thank goodness that a new, distributed feedback mechanism is emerging in the form of the blogosphere.
You know how people are always saying that complaining about the state of the world (and the world of the state) is all well and good, except that it never achieves anything? The UK’s Culture Secretary, Tessa Jowell, thinks that the great British public is about to prove those people wrong, as “whingers” put London’s Olympic bid in peril.
BRITAIN’S chance of hosting the 2012 Olympic Games is in peril because of “whingers”, Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell sensationally warned last night.
Doom-and-gloom merchants risk wrecking London’s hopes just six days after the capital was shortlisted, she said…
She told The Sun: “Whingeing pessimism and hostility will not stop our campaign but it will hand votes to the cities against which we are competing. It is whingers who will weaken our national will. At this moment, optimism, self-confidence and ambition is what we need. Let that win, not the whingers…”
Ms Jowell urged the nation to get behind the UK’s bid to stop the International Olympic Committee handing the games to Paris.
Nah. For perhaps the first time ever, I and many others are fully backing the French to win. Let’s hope a continued stream of bitching and moaning about this ridiculous misuse of taxpayer money will see them through to victory, and bring about Britain’s glorious defeat.
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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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