I quit about ten years ago. I was getting sick of it and Hillary was going to finance her health plan with taxes on cigs. I went cold turkey and being mad at Hillary helped me over the rough spots. Maybe you could think of all your money that will NOT be going to the government.
– Commenter ‘Spacer’ on how to motivate a libertarian to give up smoking
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January 12th, 2003 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
 America is to award the Congressional Medal of Honour, the equivalent of the Victoria Cross, to a British Special Boat Service (formerly Special Boat Squadron) commando who led the rescue of a CIA officer from an Afghan prison revolt. It will be the first time the medal has been awarded to a living foreigner. The Queen will have to give permission for the SBS soldier to wear it. The SBS senior NCO led a patrol of half-a-dozen SBS commandos who rescued a member of the CIA’s special activities section from the fort at Qala-i-Jangi near Mazar-i-Sharif, last November. The fort was holding 500 al-Qa’eda and Taliban prisoners, many of whom had not been searched and were still armed. An exchange of fire developed into a full-scale revolt and two CIA officers who had been interrogating the prisoners were caught in the battle in which one was killed. The uprising went on for three days and the SBS commandos remained throughout, bringing down aerial fire to quell the revolt. The battle was one of the most contentious episodes in the war last year with human rights groups raising concerns over air strikes against prisoners, some of them unarmed. The eagerness of the Americans to recognise the courage of the NCO contrasts with suspicion within the regiment that two SAS soldiers being considered for VCs for an attack on the al-Qaeda cave complex will not get them. 
Not by strength, by guile January 12th, 2003 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
In this age where ancient protections of Liberty are openly scoffed upon by the powers that be, it behooves us to proclaim loudly from the rooftops those rights they much prefer buried and forgotten. I wonder how many of you know it is a basic Right of an American Juror to judge not only on fact but on law as well? As this forum has a large libertarian readership, I wager it is far higher than in the general public – but still depressingly low. Jury Nullification is an ancient right of law inherited from England. It is yet another of the many glorious innovations in the defense of liberty invented here and forsaken in the rush to fascism of the last hundred years. Jury trial, Double Jeopardy, Habeas Corpus and Innocence until Proven Guilty all seem destined to follow it into the Westminster tip. These foundational protections are still fairly safe in America. It is also the case Jury Nullification is still valid law there. This is not a matter of strange interpretations. It is a dirty little secret which is not easily swept under the courthouse rug. I’ve known a number of activists in the battle to pass Fully Informed Jury laws, so I’ve long been aware of the importance of this concept in American history. The ancestors of many black Americans owe their freedom to this not-so-arcane bit of legal history. Juries could not be found that would convict workers on the “Underground Railroad” which helped so many escape the degradation of being self portable property. In both English and American history, Jury Nullification has been a bulwark of Liberty. It does not matter who buys the legislature if the courts cannot find a Jury of Peers willing to go along – or be bullied into going along – with the scam. This is why “The System” hates it so much. It lets you, the six-pack drinking slob on the street tell them the Law itself is unjust – and make it stick. It makes you, the citizen, the final arbiter of what is Just. I bring this up tonight because I finally “got around to” reading a legal paper by Glenn Reynolds on the topic. It’s quite a good one and I think anyone interested in how the system used to work to protect liberty should read it. Make sure everyone you know who might possibly be called for jury duty knows it as well, and knows if the Judge or Prosecutor threatens them… it is the Judge or Prosecutor who is breaking the law, not the Juror. January 12th, 2003 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
Real time speech translation, speech to text conversion, story summarization: all of these were “just around the corner” when I was a CMU grad student. I remember reading Dr. Raj Reddy’s proposal for a speech understanding system, what later became the Hearsay I project I believe. This was all going to happen in five years or so. By the time they developed Hearsay II his research group had a DEC PDP-10 (the cmub) pretty much to themselves. All the rest of us had to make do on the cmua. That was in 1973. So here we are, thirty years on, and it appears the real thing may really, finally be “five years in the future”. Some of the key elements are actually working under field conditions. It has always been inevitable we’d crack the speech understanding problem… eventually. It just took a couple years longer than we thought. [There were even more optimistic thoughts in the early 50’s, but that was computing before my time. Vacuum tube days. I think Fred Flintstone worked on the project.] So here are a few very readable documents on the current state of military applications. The Phrasealator has been tested in Afghanistan by the guy who built it. The following are pdf documents. Right click and download.
PS: Note the military dune buggy at Kandahar Airport in James Bass’ slides. I want one! January 11th, 2003 | Comments are closed
When I hear the words “new push” I always think of a) the First World War, and b) the Soviet Union. It’s what people do when their systems aren’t working – apply more mindless force. So, no surprise to find that schools are being instructed to do more new pushes. Next they will be going over the top and introducing Five Year Plans. January 11th, 2003 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
Following last week’s ricin incident it seems that the British authorities have decided to come clean with the public:
Just how long, I wonder, is that ‘short-to-medium’ term? And just how many is ’50 per cent’? Is that two people or ten thousand people? Any clue? Is this true and we’re being softened up to endure the worst or is it hogwash because the authorities have a fairly good idea who these people are but don’t want to let on that they know? Beats me. I will say, however, that if the claim in the second paragraph turns out to be correct then, leaving aside the possible ghastly consequences for a moment, it really does illustrate the extent to which the British internal security apparatus has been woefully misdirected these last few years. We live in a country with more CCTV cameras per square mile than any other country on earth, our police and customs officials have surveillance and information gathering powers that the KGB would envy and, because of Money Laundering Regulations, it is almost impossible to function in our society without having to prove identity. If I failed to send in my VAT Form at the end of this month, the state will be all over me like bluebottles on a dog-turd. Yet we could, conceivably, be playing host to scores or maybe even hundreds of potential mass-murdering terrorists and the response of the security services is to shrug and say ‘sorry, guv, haven’t got the foggiest’. Any chance of a re-assessment of priorities in future? January 11th, 2003 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
I have now been a non-smoker for seven days. A week. Nearly a fiftieth of a year! It is my sad duty to report that I don’t feel any better for having quit. In fact, I feel worse. The cravings, though fewer and less severe, still lap tauntingly at my nervous system. It’s like having an itch between the shoulder blades. My temper is, shall we say, far from even. I no longer have anything resembling a sleep pattern. Oh I do sleep. At least, I think I sleep. I find myself standing in the bathroom, scratching my arse, yawning and wondering what happened to the last seven hours. That’s sleep, isn’t it? I hope so. I no longer eat, I graze. Strange hungers afflict me at unorthodox hours. Oh Lord, why don’t cheeseburgers come in packs of twenty? I am accumulating fat like a bear preparing to hibernate. The mood swings are the worst. Last night the BBC Weather reported roads blocked by snow in the West Midlands. I was on the verge of tears. Euphoria to desolation in the space of half-an-hour is about the norm. People say stupid things when you’re trying to quit smoking. ‘Hey, David, it’s all in your mind’. ‘No kidding??!! And there was me thinking it was all in my foot. Of course, it’s all in my f*cking mind, you stupid c*nt. If it was all in my computer’s hard-drive I could just delete it and have done with.’ Testy. Did I mention that I was a little testy? Well, I’m a little testy. January 11th, 2003 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
About once every blue moon, Blogosophical Explanations springs to life, and there was another posting there as recently as December 14th of last year. It included this, from Herb Gintis, Emeritus Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts:
There are many more tangents there to fly off at than one little Samizdata posting could possibly have space for, but allow me to indulge in just one. As a description of the full panoply of human society, Tit-for-Tat is surely every bit as inadequate as Gintis says it is. All humans, provided only that they are allowed to, train each other to be more axiomatically cooperative than that, in societies which expect to survive past their next big collective crisis. But how about Tit-for-Tat as a description both of the nature of actually existing “Soviet man” and of the collapse of the Soviet system? → Continue reading: Tit-for-Tat doesn’t explain us but it does explain Homo Sovieticus January 10th, 2003 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
No, I don’t mean some figurative ‘holy grail’, nor do I mean Monty Python & The Holy Grail, I really do mean the real purported The Holy Grail. A group of modern day Knights Templar will be using modern thermal imaging and ultrasound technologies to search Rosslyn Chapel, in Scotland, long thought to be final resting place of what is said to be the real Holy Grail. January 10th, 2003 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
I love snow, but in London we often get none at all and only very rarely does it snow heavily, which is to say, actually leaving a nice white carpet (yes, I know… that hardly counts as snow at all by some standards). Yesterday however, I got my wish, with the heaviest snowfall in London in 12 years… 
The view down my street It will be mostly gone by tomorrow in all likelihood but it at least I get a day to enjoy the ephemeral splendours of winter. January 9th, 2003 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
To all those who believe that first-world farming cannot survive without the theft of subsidies, please then explain how New Zealand seems to manage with hardly any help from the state. I second the suggestion by Ross Clark in The Spectator… let’s have a buy-cott of New Zealand’s theft-free farm produce: the Kiwis puts British, European and North American agriculture to shame. January 9th, 2003 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
One of the reasons people used to pay so much attention to politics was that it offered cheap entertainment at a time when entertainment was scarce. Now entertainment is plentiful, and much of it is more entertaining than politics. January 9th, 2003 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
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