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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For about the last six or seven years I have been reminding whoever would listen that there is nothing pre-ordained about the survival as a serious force in Britain’s affairs of the Conservative Party. It could disappear without trace. Now I find myself making the equally (now) controversial point that it might not disappear. That isn’t pre-ordained either.
I have a theory about the Conservative predicament. It’s basically guesswork and could prove entirely wrong, but here goes.
The plight of the Conservatives is basically punitive. People hated their nastiness and then their nastiness and their incompetence (a particularly lethal combination) and decided to make the bastards suffer. For as long as arrogant, careerist bastard idiots continued to regard the Conservatives as an appropriate focus of their pathetic careerist fantasies, the voters would go on humiliating them. It would feature them as pathetic villains in girlie fiction who would in due course have to make way for PC wildlife photographers in the affections of the heroines. It would sneer at them relentlessly on the BBC. It would regard Conservatives as worse than motorbike freak drug addicts as potential boyfriends for their daughters in old-fashioned suburban TV sitcoms. It would trash them so mercilessly that even they, the Conservatives, would realise that something was seriously and probably permanently wrong, public affectionwise, with their social situation.
→ Continue reading: Happy new year to everyone… and maybe even to the Conservatives!
I recently had an email chat with Paul Blase, the CTO of TransOrbital, and he kindly provided me permission to publish his description of a winter night’s launch in Baikonur. I’ve known him for many years because we’ve both been involved with the Artemis [Lunar Settlement] Project, and my company (Village Networking Ltd) is also a proud member of the Artemis Group of companies. However I will be the first to admit that a small Linux, internet and software consulting and development company in Belfast, which barely (and I do mean barely!) makes ends meet is not nearly so interesting as TransOrbital. I’ll leave the rest to Paul. I had just asked him about O-rings in Russian winter…
The Dnepr is silo-launched, so environmental problems are minimal. Being an ICBM, though, they can launch the thing into a blizzard if necessary. Fortunately the night was very clear. At the launch last week it was -30 C with a nice breeze from the North. I had very warm boots and an insulated coverall. Even so, we all spent a lot of time in the tea-and-coffee trailer. Perhaps 60 people there, including the Italian launch team and the Kosmotras and Baikonur reps. (The Saudi professor got sick and went home, the German and American teams went home after the payload capsule was sealed and didn’t stay for the launch). Rather neat: it was dark so that we couldn’t see the silo proper, even with the full moon. They announced “liftoff” (they don’t use a countdown, just tell us the time left at about 15 second intervals) and suddenly this light appeared about 50 ft in the air. The sound didn’t hit for 20 seconds (the viewing stand is 7 km from the silo); not loud enough for a Shuttle launch, but definitely a rocket going off. The light soared away to the East and the night was clear enough that we could see it for a good 2 minutes, and even see the first stage cutoff and separation. They need to work a bit on their anouncer’s patter – their updates were mostly along the lines of “all systems functioning well”. It hit orbit and deployed the payloads at 915 seconds after launch, at about 5 second intervals.
Paul Blase
I have visited Kenya several times over the last thirty years and have always regarded it as one of the few outposts of relative sanity in that part of the world. Over the last fifteen years however it has grieved me to see one of the brighter sparks on the continent gradually sink into the kleptocratic morass that generally characterises African nation states.
So I really do hope that the fall of President Daniel arap Moi and his corruption riddled Kanu party spells a new beginning for Kenya. I am far too cynical to automatically assume that Mwai Kibaki and his victorious National Rainbow Coalition will not succumb to the ‘African Disease’ but I suppose the mere fact that the passing of the old political order was so painless is grounds for a little cautious optimism.
…if evil men were not now and then slain it would not be a good world for weaponless dreamers
– Rudyard Kipling, from Kim
Garry North at LewRockwell.com tells us:
Once the United States military has established control over the oil fields, which I assume it will do at the beginning of the invasion, Iraq will not be able to feed itself. Control the flow of oil, and you control the only thing worth controlling in Iraq. The government will topple. Even if it doesn’t, who cares if the U.S. government controls the oil?
At that point, the oil-drilling concessions will be handed out by the United States government’s puppet regime. “Y’all come!” This will buy off Europe’s foot-dragging politicians, who will be able to go to their voters and say, “fait accompli.” They will have offered token resistance to the United States, which is all that European voters expect. Now they will reap the rewards, either directly by the participation of their national oil companies or indirectly by enjoying a lower price of oil.
The USA wants to invade Iraq to ‘control’ the flow of oil. Bush wants to do this in order to increase the supply of oil and therefore lower the price… and clearly saying “Y’all” is prima facie evidence of conspiratorial evilness. Gotcha.
However…
“Iraq’s oil fields are capable of providing far more than an extra million barrels of oil a day. This is why the United States has in effect capped Iraqi wells by its oil-for-food embargo.
Right, so Bush has been doing beastly things to Iraq to keep oil prices up then?
Richard Perle is the chairman of President Bush’s Defense Policy Board, a civilian advisory group. He co-authored a paper in 1996, “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” which was published by the previously mentioned Institute for Advanced Strategic & Political Studies. The report is still on-line. It calls for the establishment of a new balance-of-power foreign policy in Israel – the same system, it might be added, that twice led England into world war, and which twice required the United States to bail out England. The report made suggestions to the Likud Party, which is Ariel Sharon’s party.
Ah, its not about oil, its about Israel. Right. And if ‘balance-of-power’ is such a terrible idea, when why are LewRockwell.com always so bent out of shape by the current pre-eminence of the USA?
And what is this about bailing out England? I guess Scotland, Ulster and Wales were not ‘bailed out’ then? It is usually a good indication of someone engaging in a cranio-rectal insertion when they refer to the UK as ‘England’, which is rather like describing the USA as ‘New York State’. And this is someone who has such knowledge of International Affairs that he can see through the machinations of the sinister Oil Illuminati.
The United States must defend the interests of the alliance by bringing new supplies into production. This was what the invasion of Afghanistan was all about: establishing protection over a new pipeline from the Caspian Sea oil fields, either through Afghanistan and Pakistan and into the tankers, or through Turkey. This pipeline is important if Russia is not to control this flow of oil. The Great Game of the 19th century – Russia, Turkey, England, Afghanistan, and India – is still being fought. For a good analysis of the pipeline issues, see the September, 2001 article on Turkey and the pipeline, which is posted on the Web site of the joint Israeli-American organization, the Institute for Advanced Strategic & Political Studies.
Ah. Its all about Russia! Or more accuratly, depriving Russia, the world’s second largest oil exporter, of oil. Gotcha. And that is what Afghanistan was ‘about’ too… in case an oil pipeline might, some time in the future, go through there. Or through Pakistan. Or through Turkey. Or maybe Gloucestershire?
The oil lever is the lowest-cost foreign policy tool at the government’s disposal. This will require American troops in Iraq on a permanent basis. This is a deliberate no-exit strategy. The Administration plans to send in troops that will become as permanent as its 5,000 troops in Saudi Arabia. How many troops will this be? As many as it takes to control the marginal price of oil. The United States government is about to replace OPEC as the pricing agent of world oil. The name of the game is still cartel pricing, but there will be different hands on the spigots.
Oh, so it is all about oil then! If someone can explain what this gibberish actually means, I would be very grateful. And to think there was a time when I actually admired the Lew Rockwell group.
I don’t think anyone is naive enough to believe that the highly state-controlled business of arms sales isn’t a tool of foreign policy. With that is mind, news of this deal might be interesting:
“Lockheed Martin has won a contract to supply 48 new F-16 fighter jets to Poland, in Eastern Europe’s biggest military deal.
The US firm beat off competition from the French manufacturer Dassault and a joint British-Swedish venture by BAE Systems and Saab to secure the deal.”
I have not the first clue about the relative technical merits, or otherwise, of the various fighter jets concerned but I do know that high-grade weapons deals such as this are loaded (scuse pun) with political and diplomatic significance. The arms business is seldom just about business as one of the parties to the negotiations is only too quick to point out:
“Dassault chief executive Charles Edelstenne accused the Polish government of making a political decision by choosing an American plane rather than a European one.
“The political element was the dominating element, much more than the quality of the material and the price,” he told Radio France Info.
“I felt for a very long time that they very much favoured rapprochement with the Americans. So it’s not a surprise,” he said.”
Sour grapes? Well, possibly. But, then again, he might just be right:
“Lockheed was backed by a $3.8bn US government financing package and some heavy lobbying by President George W Bush’s administration.”
Alright, every government lobbies on behalf of its domestic arms industry. But Poland is one of the ten or so former Eastern Bloc countries pencilled in to join the European Union in 2004 and, arguably, the most important of them. How odd that the Poles should so publicly rebuff their prospective Euro-partners in favour of the Great Satan.
Could it be that the above-mentioned ‘lobbying’ was about more than jet-fighters and that the Bush administration has decided it would be good strategy to gently lure the Poles away from the twitching tentacles of Brussels? Watch that space.
I can’t imagine that HMG enacts legislation with a view to spawning a whole new line of British pulp fiction novels and crime thrillers but it certainly sounds like it:
“New powers allowing police and customs officers to seize criminals’ assets come into force on Monday.
The Proceeds of Crime Act will mean that money can be confiscated from all types of criminals and not just drug dealers, as previous laws allowed.”
‘All types of criminals’?. Only the financially successful ones surely?
The Proceeds of Crime Act referred to in the article has established the Civil Assets Recovery Agency (CARA) as a branch of the police force empowered to confiscate assets from those ‘suspected’ of criminal activity.
“The new act will enable police and customs officers to search for cash anywhere in the UK and not just at the country’s borders as was previously allowed.
From now on they’ll be able to crash into your home and root around the sofa looking for lost coins. Don’t laugh, you can pick up quite a lot of money like that.
“Even when there is no criminal prosecution a new assets recovery agency can now step in.”
Which is to say, they can target anyone they want whenever they like and for reasons they will never have to prove and whilst that all sounds (and is) scary enough, I have every reason to believe that it is HMG that will regret this in the long run.
Most nominally law-abiding, work-a-day citizens will not be targeted and, consequently, will bask in blissful ignorance. No so the drug-runners and gangsters, who will be only too aware of it (they are always far better versed in the law than most citizens and quite a few lawyers) and the smart ones will regard CARA as a corruption charter. For relatively low-paid public officials, the lure of easy cash, cars or luxury goods is something to which they can all too easily become addicted. Processing law-breakers through the justice system is difficult and time-consuming. Surely much more tempting to let the gangsters get on with doing whatever it is they do and live off the earnings.
This isn’t about the government stopping criminals; this is about the government getting into bed with criminals. It’s a scriptwriters dream.
Computer games are evolving at an astonishing rate, acting as the primary driver of desktop computer development (after all, how many people actually need a 2.5 GHz CPU, a 128 Mb graphics card and 512 Mb of RAM to do word processing and spreadsheet work?)
Back in the Paleolithic age of computers (the 1980’s), computer games looked like this…
Wolfenstein: Shoot! Mild fun… but not for long
Mildly amusing but crude in the extreme. By the early 1990’s however, came the advent of the ‘FPS’: the First Person Shooter!
Wolfenstein 3D: Shoot! Great fun… but not for long
They seemed astonishing at the time, actually putting you inside the gun wielding hero. The graphics were rather basic, to put it mildly and after a while the lack of multifaceted interaction tended to make the games rather tedious after the initial ‘gee whiz’ factor wore off… other than opening doors, the only way to interact with things was to shoot at them.
My goodness how things have changed!
Wolfenstein 3D begat Doom, which begat Quake, Hexen, Marathon, Unreal, Duke Nukem, Tomb Raider etc, etc… all worthy ‘shooters’ of steadily increasing graphic quality.
Sudden surges came with games like Half Life, released at the end of the computer games neolithic era (1998) and yet still playable now…and featuring not just excellent graphics but Artificial Intelligence which actually shows a bit of intelligence, rather than just a desire to commit virtual suicide… Half Life & the spin-offs Blue Shift and Opposing Forces brought also the ability to ‘talk’ with the computer generated denizens of the game as opposed to just shoot at them.
Half Life: Don’t shoot, he is on your side.
Great fun… for hours on end!
Then games like No One Lives Forever (NOLF), a spy thriller set in the 1960’s with frequent plot specific cut scenes came along, and suddenly the story line of the computer game actually started to matter.
NOLF: Cate Archer, at the grave of her ‘dead’ mentor
The next generation of releases saw the success of story intensive NOLF and soon games of almost cinema grade plot and characterization started appearing, such as the conspiracy ladened Deus Ex and then the gritty darker than dark Max Payne.
And so yesterday the new Gamespy PC Game of the Year was announced, and it is the excellent No One Lives Forever 2.
As well as being superb graphically (caveat: you do need a high spec computer to get the best out of this game), it is just down right funny! Set in the 1960’s, this ‘spy shooter’ owes more to the wonderfully camp ‘Man from U.N.C.L.E.’ than James Bond or Smiley’s People. Although slightly more ‘serious’ than Austin Powers (but only slightly), it provides endless entertainment by allowing you to eavesdrop on the all-too-believable conversations of other people.
NOLF2: This Indian H.A.R.M. agent has a sword…
but Cate has a Kalashnikov
I look forward to continuous progress in computer games… pure distilled essence of capitalism married to explosive creativity. Within a few years, interactively with the virtual environment will be almost total, opening up steadily more ambitious story telling possibilities whilst at the same time the holy grail of photorealism comes closer to realization. The future is so bright, we are going to need shades to see it. I can hardly wait!
Patrick Crozier posted a piece on Transport Blog the other day about something called SkyTran, which I hereby throw to the Samizdata comment pack to see what they make of it. It seems like a wonderful idea.
Said Patrick:
Further to my investigations into alternatives to driving, I stumbled across a site promoting SkyTran. SkyTran will be a 100mph, computer-controlled, magnetically-levitated, almost door-to-door, non-polluting, personal transportation system. It will whisk us to our destinations in futuristic, light-weight pods, eliminate congestion at a stroke, cost next to nothing, turn a profit, allow spectacular views and be built along existing rights of way.
Can it be done? I have no idea. But I so, so hope it can. Imagine, an almost perfect transport system, making trains and cars look like the 19th century technologies that they are and consigning both to the rubbish bin of history.
I love it.
Maybe it was just that other blogs were taking the Christmas holiday off and there was nowhere else to go, but I’ve been struck not just by the quantity but also by the quality of the comments samizdata has been attracting recently. I can’t reasonably expect the number of comments that David Carr got for his piece about communism not collapsing the way it should, but a dozen or more good, informed responses to this proposal, maybe referring to what else has been said about this scheme by critics and commentators in America, is not an unreasonable hope. The more lucid of these comments, if there are any, can then be swung back to Transport Blog, together with a link to the rest if them. So let’s show these trainspotters what we can do, eh? A very cursory google search got me to several more commentaries about SkyTran, but they all seemed to be echoing the original sales pitch. Has anyone been minded to shoot the thing down in flames? → Continue reading: Might it work? – or is it just pie in the SkyTran?
I am back in the warm embrace of the West – the weather being considerably warmer in London than in Bratislava.  I shall write more about my ‘adventures’ abroad, suffice to say that towards the end of my trip I was genuinely looking forward to coming back home.
The politics and the public life in Eastern European countries usually make me appreciate the subtlety(!) of British politics, but my first encounter with the news in Britain quickly dispelled any reluctant appreciation of developed western democracy. The most upsetting development is the tax rises awaiting the British taxpayers in 2003 or as Francis Elliott of the Sunday Telegraph calls it, a ‘triple whammy’, which could add up to as much as £1,200 per family:
- A one per cent rise in National Insurance
- An average seven per cent rise in council tax
- Congestion charges in major cities
According to the same article, taxes are rising more steeply in Britain than in any other European country, while in America, the tax burden has fallen in recent years by 0.7 percent to 29.8 percent.
As Maurice Fitzpatrick of Tenon, a national accountancy firm puts it:
“This is the year that Labour will break cover as tax-raisers. People will feel a direct impact for the first time. In the past, the Government has been chipping away at the margins. This time, it will be a straightforward assault.”
I suppose Labour has no need to fear the opposition anymore, as the Tories oscillate between moribund and ridiculous. Their feeble and seriously confused proposals to reduce public spending by ‘saving’ money confirm just how clueless the Conservatives in Britain are:
“It’s too early to say how much [public spending can be reduced], but it could be up to 20 per cent. There is waste going on all over the place. It’s completely ridiculous. Everywhere there is a massive spraying of money, without it actually delivering anything.”
Shock, horror, Mr Flight. And you are going to sort it out how exactly? By setting up commitees of advisors to find ways of simplifying the tax system, and by providing government support for company directors who set up employee share schemes as a way of promoting ‘democractic capitalism’!?
Oh, and first let your comrades know, because they were very surprised to hear about this.
“We had a memo about this in November but since then, nothing. When I heard about it on the radio you could say I was more than a little surprised.”
Watching the Labour government unmask itself and the Conservative Party to hasten its demise, I wonder how much longer it will take for a decent opposition to emerge. Not that I put much hope into any opposition arising within the existing political meta-context or know what would make an opposition ‘decent’ under the circumstances. Any ideas?
“America is fighting the War on Terrorism for one reason: to Secure the American Homeland, whatever it takes. If that takes Empire, fine.”
Trent Telenko
I hope that the US destroys the North Korean Communist regime by the time I’ve posted this text. If there is a legitimate nuclear target anywhere on Earth right now, the North Korean plutonium refinery has to be it.
I also would give a cheer if Saddam Hussein were to end up dead in a traffic accident, or choke on caviar, or find breathing under a pillow difficult, or take a cruise missile up his fundament.
And I am crtainly not one of those people who hopes that lots of American troops die in Iraq over the next few months.
I fear that the British military capability is over-stretched and less effective than its champions would like us to believe. For this reason I am wary of jingoistic talk in London. I would prefer to hear about orders for a decent rifle, a decent tank, a fighter that’s actually operational and reassurance that the anti-chemical warfare suits work.
I also question the double talk about nukes in Iraq when the good reasons for toppling/killing Saddam are…
- he’s a national socialist tyrant
- he’s allegedly one of Al-Qaeda’s main financial and logistical backers.
I’m told there is evidence to back up this claim, so why the red herrings?
BUT, the comment which opens this posting worries me. First it is obvious that if President Bush were seriously taking this line (I don’t think he is, but Mr Telenko may know better), then Europe had better do a deal with the fundamentalists, because America is clearly prepared to sacrifice allies as part of “whatever it takes”, it has the ring of the Yalta betrayal about it. The history of Japan from 1902 to 1945 and its deteriorating relations with the British and Americans is a nasty precedent.
Second “if that takes empire, fine” is precisely the scenario in which libertarians should not (and many will not) support the US. Waco was not a crime because Americans were killed, September 11th would have been a crime if the only victims had been Latino office cleaners. “Homeland” is a very nasty term to the four thousand seven hundred million people who don’t have a US passport or a Green Card. If the War on Terrorism is about protecting the US at the expense of the rest of the world, we’ve got a new Iron Curtain coming down, this time in front of the Statue of Liberty.
I really didn’t expect my warnings about the long-term temptation of absolute power to be vindicated so quickly.
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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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