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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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It is a rare thing indeed when I trawl through the pages of the Subservient only to emerge with a smile and a jaunty spring in my step but today is just such an occasion.
Since the credentials of both the author of the article, a Liberal Democrat MP, and the organ in which the article appears, are impeccably federast I think it is safe to say that dire warnings of a split between the UK and Europe is not merely a product of wishful thinking.
“But there are two more profound reasons for the plunge in Britain’s status within the EU that should give Tony Blair real cause for concern. First, there is the euro. Last month, the Portuguese Prime Minister, Jose Durao Barroso, voiced in public what EU heads of government have long whispered in private – why should the UK be granted a leadership role as long as it is unwilling to sign up to one of the central tenets of EU membership? As long as EU leaders believed Tony Blair was merely biding his time before putting the issue to a referendum, there was sufficient goodwill to forgive Britain’s procrastination. But, as the Continent looks on with perplexity at the gridlock between the Prime Minister and the Chancellor, fears have deepened that Mr Blair has missed his chance.
And then, most important of all, there is Britain’s special relationship with the United States. It is difficult to capture the conflicting reactions which Blair’s ostentatious loyalty to George Bush’s foreign policy elicits within the rest of the EU.”
As I have indicated previously, our strategic alliance with the USA is something which the EU cannot tolerate alongside it’s new-found ethos of being a rival to the US and not an ally. The day of British liberation is not at hand and may not even be close but it is just a little bit closer than it was a year ago.
Tony Blair has turned out to be a love-rat; forever declaring his affections for Europe while flaunting his high-profile affair with George Bush. The question is how long he can go on two-timing them both? Surely one of these girls is going to put her foot down and demand Tony’s fidelity before much longer and who can resist the heady romance of being a war-time bride?
I didn’t vote for Blair and I do not count myself among his fans but I find myself being forced to concede that he is doing more to pave the way for British independence than any number of phoney, careerist Tories.
All is not well in the Golden State of California these days as the citizens of that fine place continue to struggle under the governorship of Gray Davis, the man who helped acquaint Californians with the sort of power blackouts we Brits used to get in the unlamented 1970s.
This article (link courtesy of Virginia Postrel) shows how bad the tax revenue situation is on the West Coast, but also points out that the public sector there is as bloated as ever.
My recent trip to California last year confirmed such reports. One thing I was struck by was the poor quality of the freeways, in contrast to the smooth fast roads of neighbouring Nevada.
California could certainly use someone like Ronald Reagan, its last great governor, to shake it up and kick some ass in that state. Many political and economic trends seem to start on the West Coast, like the internet and tax revolts. A place for we Anglospherists to watch.
Perhaps it is better to be irresponsible and right, than to be responsible and wrong
– W. S. Churchill
There is an interesting post by David Kenner over on An Age Like This complete with pictures he took, of the pro-Saddam Hussain protests in Washington DC. It is good to see a bit of blog primary reportage.
Also David has a picture of Protest Awards!: Most Offensive Banner.
Here is a fascinating comment from Sunday Fox News by DefSec Rumsfeld:
Rumsfeld: It — it certainly is not an act of peace or an act of cooperation. The coalition forces our — U.K. planes and our aircrews are constantly subjected to being fired at by the Iraqis. It’s been going on for some years now. It’s the only place in the world where we’re being fired at, as a matter of fact, on a regular basis, except for Afghanistan.
Snow: So, we’re already at war?
Rumsfeld: Well, technically, the state of war that began in —
Snow: Was never —
Rumsfeld: — 1980 — 91 — has never ended. I mean, the — that has still — there is currently a state of war with Iraq that has not ended.
I was just catching up on some of my technical reading. There’s a lot of exciting and original work going on at DARPA. There always has been but the stuff coming down the pike now is just off in the realms of Science Fiction, as you can see from these words of the current DARPA Director, Tony Tether:
“Now that is terrific, but that is not the chilling part. We took the joystick away from the monkey at Duke. The light came on. Who knows what the monkey really thought, but it knew what it had to do. But it had no joystick. However, the mechanical arm at MIT moved the joystick just like it did before. It was thought at first that the motor signal was being transmitted to MIT, but it turned out that the probes had tapped into the monkey’s thoughts for moving the joystick. In other words, the monkey thought about moving the joystick, and the joystick at MIT moved. “
Fascinating in and of itself. But it leads to ever wilder things in the future, as he says in a later paragraph:
“Imagine 25 years from now where old guys like me put on a pair of glasses or a helmet and open our eyes. Somewhere there will be a robot that will open its eyes and we will be able to see what the robot sees. We will be able to remotely look down on a cave and think to ourselves, “Let’s go down there and kick some butt.” And the robots will respond, controlled by our thoughts. It’s coming. Imagine a warrior–with the intellect of a human and the immortality of a machine–controlled by our thoughts. “
I’ll go one further. Imagine a whole bunch of these as semi-autonomous robots slaved to master robots “inhabited” by Marines. Let them shift their viewpoint and control moment by moment from one to another of the uninhabited warbots as needed… If you ever played the old PC game, “Hulk” you’ll know he origins of the idea and how it works.
I don’t really think you are going to go into battle with just Remotely Piloted Soldiers, but I can see the idea as an absolutely huge force multiplier for the troops on the spot.
It’s getting really spooky out here near the singularity.
It is often said that technology is developing far more rapidly than would have predicted at such-and-such a time. But there is another point of view.
And it is still being claimed that we live in a period of exceptionally rapid technical progress and one in which the time elapsing between invention and application tends to get shorter whereas it seems to be true that ours is really an epoch of comparative technological sluggishness when there are not very many authentically new things about and even these, for many different reasons, are being developed rather slowly. (How much longer, for example, will we have to wait for efficient battery-operated motorcars which will enable the pounding, smelly reciprocating engine to be thrown on the scrap-heap; or the typewriter which will type as one dictates, which will release hundreds of young women for other more interesting tasks; or audio-visual cassettes which will enable us to break away from the tyranny and the interminable boredom of modern television; or a cure for the common cold; or much cheaper and efficient ways of digging tunnels so that the surface of the earth could reoccupied by people instead of being overrun by machines; or really substantial cuts in costs of desalination rendering it possible to turn deserts into gardens. This list could easily extended.)
John Jewkes, Government and Technology, Third Wincott Memorial Lecture, 31st October 1972.
Well we have audio-visual cassettes now, and instead of typewriters that do not take dictation we have computers that still (in spite of the endless “computer that understands the human voice” inventions reported regularly since the 1960’s) have problems taking dictation. As for such things as cheap desalination (promised in California as long ago as 1956) we are still waiting – I would also mention nuclear fusion (we have been promised that since the early 1950’s).
The oft voiced claim that ours is the age of the most rapid technological development can certainly be contested.
Sure I am of this, that you have only to endure to conquer. You have only to persevere to save yourselves
– W. S. Churchill
…or how to ensure your kids are more technologically literate than you.
One of the best ways to motivate someone is to present the person with a challenge. For children, forbidding something works equally well, if not better. So when I came across this product in one of those little catalogues that come with Sunday newspapers, I immediately realised its potential to do an amazing service in further advancing the technological awareness of the young generation.
Achieve total control over TV time
Worried about the hours your children spend watching TV or playing computer games? This remarkable new British invention hands back control to parents. Using the electronic Parent Key, you program the child’s daily viewing allowances into Screenblock – say, 7-8 am and 5-7 pm. As the TV mains cable is routed via the locked compartment, Screenblock controls the power supply, turning it on and off at the times requested. But here’s the best bit! It also comes with two electronic cards which act like a football ref’s cards. Wave the yellow one at Screenblock and today’s allowance is reduced by 15 mins – and red means the TV stays off until tomorrow. The all-important Parent Key also overrides all settings when the kids are in bed and it’s time for grown-up viewing.
So far, so good. But if parents led by the desire to curb their children’s TV-viewing habits succumb to the advertising and purchase such devices en masse, pretty soon many a technologically gifted whizkid will be popular, spots or no spots. Not only ways to disable the screenblock will be devised, but kids will be ‘instructed’ in how to do that themselves without their modifications being detected. Part of the solution will have to be the inability of parents to notice the ‘adjustment’. Aren’t you just grateful to the screenblock inventors for broadening your children’s technological horizons?
Although attention is focused on the nightmarish regime in Iraq, please spare an angry thought for the vile rulers of Zimbabwe, who are still starving and murdering sections of the population felt to be ‘disloyal’ to Robert Mugabe.
George Bush, supported by Tony Blair, will clear up Daddy’s (and Donald’s) mess in Iraq by spending several billion dollars and sending a few hundred thousand troops to see the end of Saddam Hussain… Blair could do something about tyranny in Zimbabwe for a fraction of that price if he had the moral fortitude. For all his many and varied sins, Saddam is not (currently) killing and dispossessing British subjects, which cannot be said for Robert Mugabe.
Will the British state please stop spending my appropriated tax money on funding the comforts of former Taliban asylum seekers and, given that I suppose it is too much to expect my money back, start sending crates of rifles and ammunition to opposition groups in Zimbabwe.
Glenn Reynolds put me on the trail of this one: EMP weapons.
I personally don’t know what all the fuss is about. New Scientist published an article a year or three ago which shows how to build one of these in your garage. Perhaps getting things right for targeting from a moving cruise missile and accurately controlling the output energy are the special part… but the main concept is dead easy.
If you are interested, go dig it up yourself. I’m not going to tell you how.
Once WWIII is over with… perhaps.
Sir John Stevens, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner warned the British public today in a television interview that Islamic terrorists linked to al-Qa’eda remain at large in Britain and pose a continuing security threat. He believes that Osama bin Laden and his henchmen are seeking to make use of existing terror networks in plans for further attacks.
“We know that there are certain links with al-Qa’eda and, of course, the link with North Africa is proven.”
Presumably, this has nothing to do with Britain’s policy on asylum seekers that allows a Taliban soldier who fought British and American troops in Afghanistan to be granted asylum here because he fears persecution from the new Western-backed government in Kabul (as already mentioned by Perry in the post below).
Although this is the first known case of a Taliban soldier being granted asylum in this country, I have no doubt that many have entered Britain with false documents and identities. They may need not bother anymore. Unless the policy changes, the successful application may open the doors to hundreds of other similar requests.
I wonder whether in few months’ time the police chief will insist that his officers are ‘on top of’ the situation. It seems that the left hand does not know what the right is doing.
Indeed, the state is not your friend.
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