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]
By the time the ‘evacuation’ bus delivered Rand Simberg and I to the parking lot of the Mariah Hotel, the wind was far worse. ‘They call the Hotel, Mariah’, Rand quipped on the bus. The wind, however, was more like raging beast. The car was just around back and we had to lean into the sandblast.
Rand thought there might be a party over at the XCOR hanger, but it was rather dark when we arrived. I was unconvinced anyone was still there and stayed in the car. Rand got out to knock on the office door and somehow managed to do so without being carried aloft like some Wizard of Oz character.
So. No joy on Plan A. Plan B perhaps? The spaceport bar at the Mariah? So, back we went. It turned out this was where the action was tonight. We did a quick turn of the downstairs and found Alan Boyle at work near the Christmas tree in the Mariah lobby. He worked so much today he must still have been sober.
Alan was transported from tent to hotel without missing a keystroke.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
While Rand went off to see who else was around, I took a few lobby photos and examined the rather interesting hotel trophy case.
Yep, this is the spaceport hotel…
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
When Rand did not turn up again after a few minutes I went looking and naturally found him with another journalist in the bar. Where else do you find journalists? (Except Alan of course.) They type, they drink and therefore they are.
I must admit my photos went rapidly down hill in quality. By the end of the night the results were about as blurred as what I was actually seeing. Remember, we had free Absolut and wine all day… this was just the after the party party!
It was around this time I heard the evacuation was not just precautionary: the tents had been demolished by the winds.
Len David and Rand Simberg at the Spaceport Bar.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
Pretty much everyone was there, including Burt Rutan and Richard Branson.
Sir Richard hung out in the Spaceport Bar with a few hundred close friends.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
Since Mojave is the first official commercial spaceport, I am guessing that makes the Mariah Hotel bar the very first official spaceport bar!
The first spaceport bar.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
Mostly we stayed in our quiet corner: not too crowded there and the bar staff kept full bottles in our hands. Misuzu Onuki, designer of fashion for space travelers, joined us for awhile. It was impossible to get a candid shot of her as she is just too camera aware! This is not to mention that, by this time, it was surprising I could even find the shutter button…
Barb Sprungman, Len David and Misuzu Onuki.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
Although the party showed little sign of slowing down, we had a long trip ahead of us. Rand pointed me down the hallway towards the front door, but I stopped in the front room to thank Virgin Galactic President Will Whitehorn for a marvelous time. I also noticed Sir Richard was still hanging out and seemed to be enjoying himself thoroughly. He was in a small knot of folk talking in the back of the room.
Yep, this is just as I remember seeing it….
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
When we arrived back in LA, I posted my Samizdata teaser story and got into an online chat with one of my friends from the Mojave community. She asked if I felt like helping with the hunt for designer jackets tomorrow morning at the spaceport East fence…
This is the last of a series of 7 articles on the SpaceShipTwo roll out at the Mojave Spaceport. The previous article is here
An Islamic group called islam4uk, who are a front organisation for the islamo-fascist group al-Muhajiroun, want to march through Wootton Bassett carrying “symbolic coffins” as a protest against the ongoing British participation in the Afghan civil war against the Taliban.
My suggestion is that the good people of Wootton Bassett reply by throwing “symbolic bricks” at the Islamo-fascist protesters, should they actually ever march down that town’s streets. Just symbolic bricks of course, made of sponge cake… or maybe bricks of good English bacon or Danish butter as I am sure the cheerful chaps of al-Muhajiroun will get the joke… not real bricks, because we do not want any Islamo-fascists to get their brains bashed out by our jolly japes… well, not whilst they are in Britain at least.
But what I would really like to see is for Islam4uk carry out a march carrying symbolic coffins through a street in beautiful downtown Bazarak in Panjshir Province in Afghanistan. Just about everyone there is a muslim, so what could possibly go wrong, eh? Go on, guys, give it a try.
I pretty much endorse this list, over at Big Hollywood, of the 10 worst films of the past 10 years, although I am sure Samizdata readers will come up with some more for their own lists. I did not see No Old Country For Old Men, which is one of the derided films on the list, but the way that certain reviewers wrote about it, meant I just knew it was the sort of pretentious, nihilistic waste of several hours that the writer in the article I have linked to said it was. Plus I happen to think the Coen brothers are a bit over-rated anyway, although I quite enjoyed Fargo.
As for the best 10 films of the past decade, name your choices. For my part, I would say that two films I saw last year – The Wrestler and Gran Torino – deserve to be on such a list. Here are my other choices:
The Aviator – the biopic of Howard Hughes.
Serenity – Okay, it helps to have seen the Firefly TV series first, but even so, a fine film.
Casino Royale – Despite some flaws, it marked a triumphant reboot of 007 on the screen. Ian Fleming would have approved.
Sideways – A funny comedy set in California’s wine country. My tour of Napa and Sonoma was not quite as eventful.
Spirited Away – Proof that Miyazaki remains one of the world’s greatest animators and film artists.
The Incredibles – I loved this film and much of its sense of life. The “designer” character is a hilarious combo of fashionista and Ayn Rand.
Gladiator – “Upon my signal, unleash hell”. The film that made Russell Crowe a megastar.
The Lives of Others – Brilliant film set in former East Germany, demonstrating the utter evil that is done in the name of the “surveillance state”.
Reason magazine’s Nick Gillespie – writing in the WSJ – has a nice article up about how the ‘Noughties (sorry, I cannot think of a better term) have been generally miserable ones for those concerned about liberty and constraining government. He also has a few predictions for the next 10 years. Even leaving aside the response to 9/11 attacks and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, governments have lost few chances to find reasons, or excuses, to tax, monitor and generally annoy us. I love this paragraph:
“As a sadly appropriate parting gift to this grim first decade of the 21st century, a period so debased that the Boston Red Sox managed to win not just one but two World Series, we can thank Nigerian would-be suicide bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab for robbing us of our inalienable right to use a cramped bathroom at 30,000 feet. Indeed, we can only await Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano’s directive that all frequent fliers must now go commando as a condition of air travel.”
Nudity as a condition of air travel. There’s an idea to conjure with on this cold Sunday afternoon.
“Our exercise program can dramatically improve a woman’s sexual performance,” says Olga Nikitina, 40, the founder of the School for VUM-Building in central Moscow. “She can transform herself from a slow Russian car like a Lada into a Ferrari.” To disguise the fact that the equipment really does look like it belongs in a car-mechanic’s workshop – it’s all pressure gauges and rubber hoses – the school’s two rooms are painted pink and blue; stuffed animals model phallic devices.
“Once a woman reaches optimal fitness, she can shoot a fountain of water up out of her vagina in the bath,” boasts Nikitina, a ponytailed blonde in a leopard-print top. The core device is a small silicone balloon that is inserted in the vagina and inflated with a pneumatic pump. “You squeeze against the balloon and measure the pressure on the attached gauges,” says Nikitina. Fine-tuning can be achieved by learning to shoot out pebbles onto a metal target.
In a recent discussion on climate change I mentioned what I call the coming carbon collapse, that point at which human generated carbon emissions go to zero or even negative. If you wondered what I was talking about, here is just one of the technologies roaring down the tracks at us in 2010, brought to you courtesy of the Hero of the Capitalist Revolution who beat the socialist Human Genome Project to completion.
Ho hum! The letter is barking mad but it still needs hours of constructing a careful response, the net effect of which will be the same as two Anglo Saxon words.
– Richard North responds to a lawyers‘ letter in a comment on this posting. My thanks to Bishop Hill for an email that got me noticing this latest twist in the Climategate saga a little sooner than I otherwise would have.
Is there not some adage about the sort of men who beat their wives? That they do so because they are trying to cover up their feelings of inadequacy by showing off their ‘power’?
Why do we not just disband this worthless organization and admit it never has been nor will be of any use whatever?
As Michael Jennings has already reminded us, it is now that time of year, when we look back at the rest of the year. I too will now look back at 2009. Whereas Michael trots the globe, my preferred outdoor activity is walking around London, taking photos, an activity which, as of now, remains more or less legal.
And one of the things I especially like to photo is Evening Standard headlines. Not the headlines in the actual newspaper itself, but the ones on the outside of the contraptions behind which the sellers of the Evening Standard sit. I don’t do this as obsessively as this guy, but I do it every few days or so, whenever a particularly intriguing or doom-laden headline hoves into view.
Click on all these headlines to get the original picture that I took, often a bit prosaic, as in: just the headline and its immediate surroundings; but sometimes with further fun and games, in particular further headlines next to the one I’ve featured in the little squares below. So, for instance, to consider just the first two snaps, on Jan 5, besides the amazing news that it was quite cold in January 2009 (just as it is quite cold now – see Dec 22(a)) you can also see talk of “TORY TAX CUTS”. We wish. Still in January, you can ponder the ever widening gap that separates the ever more bogus hero Barack Obama from the real deal: “CAPTAIN COOL IN RIVER JET CRASH”.
The most regular themes are: economic woe, politicians cheating on their expenses, the consequent relentless criticism of and plotting against the Prime Minister, and the equally relentless way the Prime Minister just bashes on with his ruinous activities, seemingly impervious to all complaints.
See especially June 5, which is worth clicking on for, I humbly submit, artistic reasons This is certainly my favourite photo of all these, in terms of the atmosphere it evokes and the memories it will stir in me in future years, one of the main reasons I take photos being just remind myself of what I was interested in, whenever it was. I love that digital cameras automatically attach dates to everything. So, here we go.
There are three for July, because none of the three headlines you see seemed to me to deserve exclusion.
January 5, 20 – February 11, 19:
March 19, 23 – April 15, 24:
May 2, 5 – June 5, 24:
July 10, 21, 31 – August 11, 26:
September 8, 10 – October 8, 20:
November 17, 19 – December 22, 22:
Well, I hope you liked all that, even if without a lot of clicking.
You may now be saying to yourself that November and December have become pretty anti-climactic, and you would be right. For there is another story here, besides all the stories alluded to in the headlines. These photos serve not just as a random walk through the year 2009, but as a probable elegy for the Evening Standard itself, and certainly for the long London era of Evening Standard headlines in the streets.
Click on October 20 for the first clue. That’s right. Some time around then, the Evening Standard stopped costing any money, and started being handed out free. At first the guys giving it away carried on with the billboards, but I knew that this practice would soon fade away. If no money is being made in the street from these newspapers, why go to all the bother of advertising them in the street. So it is that if you click on the last picture of all, you see that where there used to be informatively alarming stories about doom and disaster, now there are only forlorn signs saying that the ES now costs nothing.
This switch to the ES being a giveaway came only a few months after its takeover by a Russian Oligarch. How soon before the ES vanishes altogether, becoming itself the subject of a few more doom-laden headlines in other organs, before it sinks from the memory of Londoners?
“And what should our mood be? The population restrictionists say we should be sad and worry. I and many others believe that the trends suggesst joy and celebration at our newfound capacity to support human life – healthily, and with fast-increasing access to education and opportunity all over the world. I believe that the population restrictionists’ hand-wringing view leads to despair and resignation. Our view leads to hope and progress, in the reasonable expectation that that the energetic efforts of humankind will prevail in the future, as they have in the past, to increase worldwide our numbers, our health, our wealth, and our opportunities…..Adding more people causes problems, but people are also the means to solving those problems.”
– Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource, 2nd edition, page 588.
The other day, Perry de Havilland took aim at those who would use the violence-backed power of the State to restrict human population. The late Julian Simon had no time for the neo-Malthusian mindset. Among other things, he did not regard wealth as somehow fixed and that if there were more people around, there would be less for each person. We are richer now than we were 100 years ago, and there are more of us. If you want a book that cuts through the crud of the gloomongering cast of mind, this book still ranks up top as one of the very best.
If religious leaders get the urge to spout off on religious topics to the religiously inclined, well I suppose that is what they are for. But why oh why does the Church of England think it is appropriate for them to have any corporate opinion at all on purely secular matters like advertising?
Why should a bunch of clerics think they have any business demanding the state regulate the media? Exactly what biblical basis do they have for supporting the imposition of restrictions on what people do on TV? I must have missed the passage in the New Testament where it says “The Lord says tell Caesar to threaten those who sayth things you don’t approve of”.
I have zero tolerance for a state privileged organization who claim to speak from a position of moral superiority advocating force backed restrictions on secular life. The sooner the Church of England is disestablished the better.
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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