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]
|
Whilst looking for something entirely different I stumbled across the public domain slides and script for a talk given by John Poindexter: “Information Awareness Office Overview”. Since there was some discussion about this DARPA research project a few weeks ago, I have acquired copies and placed them on our server.
That way, if a slashdot occurs, instead of causing headaches for some unsuspecting research site administrator, I’ll only annoy the ISP that hosts us.
You will probably want to do “the rightclick download thing” as these are pdf documents.
- Information Awareness Office Overview script
- Information Awareness Office Overview slides
Cheers!
Addendum: If there is sufficient interest, I will acquire and post some of the other talks.
Our favourite pinko blogger, Brian Linse is in London…
Little does he know the effect of drinking out of a Samizdata.net Coffee Mug will have on his fragile political sensibilities…muuuahhhhhh!
Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott plans to restrict the right of council tenants to buy their homes. This is very encouraging to me as it is a policy calculated to remind the large ‘new bourgeoise’ of former ‘working class’ people with aspirations to become property owners just how out of sync a socialist meta-context is with their real lives.
The problem is now that some tenants have bought their homes at big discounts, and then sold them on to property companies, who in turn sell them on at a profit.
Yes, shocking. When ‘working class’ people (a largely empty term when in reality the majority of British society is utterly bourgeois) make too much money, they start getting strange notions that they should be allowed to keep it and that is clearly something the Labour Party needs to stamp on! The notion of poor people turning a big fat profit by engaging in capitalist activities like selling their own property is anathema to a party which exists to dole out other people’s stolen money to a supplicant class.
In a manner which is actually technically more in tune with the fascist variant of socialism, they are happy for people to ‘own’ private property’ (e.g. such as allowing a person to purchase their council house), but if they then dispose of that ‘private’ property for their personal benefit in a manner not in accordance with ‘national objectives’, that is seen as an ‘abuse’. Which is to say, Labour shares the fascist view that private property is just fine, particularly the bit in which the former council tenant pays the council for the property… provided it does not actually then mean the new ‘owner’ in reality controls the thing he has just paid for.
Economically at least, modern regulatory statism has a large streak of fascist thinking at its core and this is an good example of that sensibility at work.
Gun crime continues to rise in Britain, with two young girls shot dead
at a party last night.
Perhaps Britain should ban all handguns. Oh, that’s right… they already are banned. So let’s ban… I dunno… let’s ban something else… toy guns, just like they are in Sweden! That will do the trick!
“A convoy of anti-war activists, likely to include dozens of British volunteers, will leave London next month to act as human shields protecting strategic sites in Iraq.”
Oh please not again.
– Salam Pax
Spiritual movements are revolts of thought against inertia, of the few against the many; of those who because they are strong in spirit are strongest alone against those who can express themselves only in the mass and the mob, and who are significant only because they are numerous
– Ludwig von Mises
I picked up the following little titbit from an email newsletter of We The People. For those of you who don’t remember, that is Bob Schultz’s tax protest organization.
It seems that Congressman Henry Hyde thinks the Constitution he swore to uphold and protect is just a bit, well… passe:
“Congressman Ron Paul reminded the Chairman of the House of Representatives Committee on International Relations that the Constitution required a congressional Declaration of War before the armed forces of the United States could be applied in hostilities overseas, not H.J.R 114, a congressional Resolution authorizing the President to decide if and when to apply that force.
However, Chairman Henry Hyde is quoted, for the record, “There are things in the Constitution that have been overtaken by events, by time. Declaration of war is one of them. There are things no longer relevant to a modern society.Why declare war if you don’t have to? We are saying to the President, use your judgment. So, to demand that we declare war is to strengthen something to death. You have got a hammerlock on this situation, and it is not called for. Inappropriate, anachronistic, it isn’t done anymore…”
The 50-member Committee then went on to vote against the substitute amendment offered by Rep. Paul, which read simply (after the resolving clause), “That pursuant to Article I, Section 8 of the United States Constitution, a state of war is declared to exist between the United States and the Government of Iraq and the President is hereby authorized and directed to employ the United States Armed Forces to carry on war against the Government of Iraq and to bring the conflict to a successful conclusion.”
The Committee then went on to approve H.J. Resolution 114, which was eventually approved by Congress.”
Ron Paul is the nearest thing to a libertarian we have in public office. Although he is registered Republican… he is a libertarian. Some of you may remember his 1988 Presidential campaign with Andre Marrou as his Vice Presidential running mate. I was a Russell Means delegate at the nominating convention in Seattle that year, but that’s how it is in politics. Once the streamers and confetti have been swept off the convention floor everyone gets behind “the horse what won”. I wrote the Space Policy statements for them and thus had the chance to work with Ron and his campaign team on a number of occasions.
Ron’s congressional statements were not grandstanding. They were principled statements of his belief in the Constitution and in Liberty. That is just the sort of man he is.
For those space activists among us: Ron Paul is also the only Presidential candidate to ever appear at an International Space Development Conference: the 7th ISDC, held in Denver in May 1988. Some of the local Colorado LP were working his Denver visit and one of them was also on the ISDC conference committee (I had chaired the year before in Pittsburgh). He knew me in both my LP hat and my L5 hat… so I acted as liaison and briefer before Ron’s talk. We even had a heckler from Martin-Marietta to keep it interesting: Bob Zubrin!
It has just gone midnight here in the UK and so I will begin by extending my very best wishes to all our readers for a happy, healthy and prosperous New year. Sadly, I suspect it will not be peaceful.
However, there is some good news to be had. The BBC TV teletext news service (no link, sorry) is reporting the result of a nationwide survey of parents the result of which is that a relatively whopping thirty one percent are considering home-schooling. The reason given was the growing disillusionment with the current education system.
Since this is not the kind of news the BBC would wish to propogandise about, it may just be an accurate reflection on the way Britain is moving on this issue.
There are all manner of idiots in the world. There are dangerous idiots, annoying idiots, (Lord help us) influential idiots and then there are some idiots who wallow in such specious gibberish that it requires a hard heart to look upon them as anything other than pitiful.
The Guardian (where else?) has a long record of providing a platform for pitiful idiots as illustrated by the column they insist on giving to George Monbiot:
“If we take into account such factors as pollution and the depletion of natural capital, we see that the quality of life peaked in the UK in 1974 and in the US in 1968, and has been falling ever since. We are going backwards.”
Perhaps it’s just you that is going backwards, George. Not sure about the rest of us. Mind you if you right, then perhaps the nutty 60’s has something to do with it.
“The reason should not be hard to grasp. Our economic system depends upon never-ending growth, yet we live in a world with finite resources. Our expectation of progress is, as a result, a delusion.”
Ah George, you haven’t been reading your Julian Simon like a good boy. You haven’t have you? Naughty.
“Speak this truth in public and you are dismissed as a crank, a prig, a lunatic.”
Which you clearly have been.
“The laws of thermodynamics impose inherent limits upon biological production.”
Er, care to explain that, George?
“Even the repayment of debt, the pre-requisite of capitalism, is mathematically possible only in the short-term. As Heinrich Haussmann has shown, a single pfennig invested at 5% compounded interest in the year AD 0 would, by 1990, have reaped a volume of gold 134bn times the weight of the planet. Capitalism seeks a value of production commensurate with the repayment of debt.”
I’d love to give this a Fisking but I must confess that I have no idea what the f*cking hell he is actually talking about. It sounds like the kind of marxoid tripe they teach at universities and which is so deliberately opaque that it must be very clever and authoratative and therefore beyond question.
“Now, despite the endless denials, it is clear that the wall towards which we are accelerating is not very far away. Within five or 10 years, the global consumption of oil is likely to outstrip supply. Every year, up to 75bn tonnes of topsoil are washed into the sea as a result of unsustainable farming, which equates to the loss of around 9m hectares of productive land.”
Time for a ‘Made-up-Statistics’ warning!
“Every national newspaper in Britain lamented the “disappointing” volume of sales before Christmas. Sky News devoted much of its Christmas Eve coverage to live reports from Brent Cross, relaying the terrifying intelligence that we were facing “the worst Christmas for shopping since 2000”.
Suppose that has nothing whatsoever to do with Gordon Brown’s tax increases which have deprived us of so much of our disposable income? No, course not. Silly me for even asking.
“The economist Bernard Lietaer has shown how a system based upon negative rates of interest would ensure that we accord greater economic value to future resources than to present ones. By shifting taxation from employment to environmental destruction, governments could tax over-consumption out of existence. But everyone who holds power today knows that her political survival depends upon stealing from the future to give to the present.”
‘Bernard Lietaer’? Never heard of him but I’ll wager that he’s the kind of smelly, dysfunctional political activist who haunts Labour Party fringe meetings with a shopping bag full of newspaper clipping and scribbled essays in the hope that he’ll get an opportunity to corner some hapless victim and bore them into the grave.
“Everything we thought was good – giving more exciting presents to our children, flying to a friend’s wedding, even buying newspapers – turns out also to be bad.”
Buying the Guardian is definitely bad. Otherwise that one sentence contains everything you need to know about Mr.Monbiot. He is a jealous, begrudging loser who has spun an ideological mask of deceit around himself in order to provide a fig-leaf for his po-faced, anti-human, defeatist miserabilism.
Pitiful. Just pitiful.
There has been some discussion on the Libertarian Alliance Forum about “if they know where the weapons are, then why don’t they just tell the inspectors where to go?” I will attempt to tackle this question from a tacticians’ point of view.
Iraq is big: about the size of France and a hell of a lot emptier. There are miles of underground facilities. We can’t possibly be one hundred percent certain we’ve found everything. No matter how long the inspectors take there is uncertainty for the Searchers. However there is also uncertainty for Saddam. He can’t know what our spies have found out, if anything.
So we have a mathematical “game” with two players that might be likened to “battleship”, but is far more complex. It’s also deadly serious. There are potentially hundreds of thousands of lives at stake.
One player has assets on his hidden board and the other player is trying to find them. The second player knows where some of the assets are but can’t even be sure what percentage they know of; the other side knows all of its’ assets but can’t be sure how many of them the other side knows. This gives us a matrix of four possibilities:
- Searcher knows of the asset : Owner believes the Searcher knows of it.
- Searcher does not know of the asset : Owner believes the Searcher knows of it.
- Searcher knows of the asset : Owner believes the Searcher does not know of it.
- Searcher does not know of the asset : Owner believes the Searcher does not know of it.
What is the best strategy for each player?
The owner will be as helpful as possible on all the sites they believe the Searcher knows of. They can clean them out in advance and pretend great surprise at the inspection. The pretense also assists them in their game playing over the other three categories. → Continue reading: Why doesn’t the CIA tell them?
I am trying to figure out who ‘Holland & Barrett’ are worried might sue them if they discovered NUTS in their packet of… Whole Cashew Nuts!
Perhaps not the best feel-good title for my first posting and certainly not the usual New Year’s Eve admonition but it concerns the aspect of reality that urged me to blog in the first place. It is also just too horrible to pass on in the interest of New Year’s festivities.
There are many living hells in the world today but North Korea deserves a special mention. According to Anthony Daniels, one of the few journalists to have visited North Korea, no other regime comes remotely as close to annihilating the human personality as North Korea’s does. Never in history have human beings been so dragooned into uniformity and blind obedience as in North Korea. The regime is one of bread and circuses: but attendance at the circuses is compulsory and the bread has been replaced by rockets.
The North Korean ideal is an eternal marchpast of the Leader by millions of people, expressionless until they let out a howl of rehearsed joy when the leader raises his hand to them. I have seen it myself, and am glad to have done so: for it was absolute political evil, the ne plus ultra of inhumanity.
I know most people realise that North Korea is a ‘bad guy’ although Bush mentioning it as part of the Axis of Evil will certainly prompt some anti-American idiotarians into defending it. In some vague way, we know North Korean are oppressed by a Stalinist-type regime, have been starving for some time and now the North Korean leadership have hit the headlines with their nuclear weapons antics. But just as during the Cold War we didn’t know what communism really meant for the individual citizen in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, now we don’t know how exactly the North Korean variety of communism continues to crush human creativity, spirit and dignity.
It doesn’t help that an alarmingly high number of other useful idiotarians who have encountered the evil there either cannot or refuse to see it. The former US President Jimmy Carter managed to see in Pyongyang a second Manhattan. Anthony Daniels calls it not blindness, but hallucination. He concludes: The only question, then, is how to destroy it once and for all: whether to let time take its toll (for all things pass); to offer little fat Kim a gilded retirement in Monaco watching the pornographic films that he is said to like; or to threaten war.
I know which option I’d take.
|
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.
|
Recent Comments