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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Because of my interests and network of friends in the business, things of interest often cross my virtual (and real) desk. Sometimes they are surprising. This time my jaw is still laying under the desk and I am applying a healthy dose of skepticism until I really, really am sure these are real and not exceedingly good fakes. I do not think they are and I have examined them closely. The first is the F/A-37, reportedly capable of Mach 3.5 supercruise and top speed in excess of Mach 4. It is shown on board the USN George Washington for catapult fit tests according to the source.
The only thing I can say about this one is it has some familiar resemblance to some test articles I am aware of, and it looks a bit like some things which have been described coming out of Groom Lake. Other than that, it has me absolutely flat-footed… if it is real.
F/A-37 prototype on USN George Washington.
Photo: original source unknown (Now pinned down to the making of the movie “Stealth”)
The second aircraft caught me only a little less flat footed. I am well aware of the base design of the aircraft but to my knowledge it was just a concept design, something that might or might not be built 20 years from now. Given the efficiency and strength and capacity (larger than the Airbus 280) this has got to have Airbus executives reaching for the Maalox… if it is real.
Boeing 797 Blended Wing/Body aircraft.
Photo: original source unknown. (Now pinned down as photoshopped.)
Given that these images are now slithering their way around the mailboxes of the cognoscenti, I am certain we will be hearing more about them one way or the other. I think this is on the up and up, but I am just not yet sure of it.
So, any comments on what has this Samizdata Editor in a state of flabbergasted shock?
Even though I dislike most Oliver Stone films, Wall Street is one of my favourites, precisely because the “Greed is Good” speech is essentially correct even if the word “greed” is a bit misleading. Which is why I might just take a risk and watch this sequel when it hits the UK.
Madsen Pirie has a new book, 101 Great Philosophers. It’s an amazingly compact account of the ideas of those who made modern thought. It’s a heroic venture, romping through the giants of Western civilization at a cracking pace which allows only 400 words on each of them. The result is a highly condensed overview of philosophy and philosophers, enough to give even a beginner a working grasp of what it’s all about, but with enough meat to interest philosophers themselves in his take on the subject.
It takes a cool analytical brain to do this (which Madsen has), and he has produced a book that will lead many into a subject they had previously only wished they knew more about. I rather think that academic philosophers will disparage it, largely because it demystifies their subject. Their careers are made by writing technical papers for each other that bear little on what philosophy can offer to our lives.
In an age when people demand condensed information they can absorb quickly, I think Madsen has produced a book that delivers the goods. Its available from Amazon, and it’s a fascinating and highly informative read.
It is not just the economic downturn that has got us deep in debt, it is a consumerist politics in which our elected representatives feel compelled to tell us we can have our cake, eat it and walk out without paying.
Writes Matthew Taylor, former policy adviser to the Blair government, in today’s Times. I think that is not quite right. Not “feel compelled” – “are compelled”. Elected representatives do not stay elected very long unless they maintain the fiction for those who voted for them that someone else is less deserving, someone else is paying.
Taylor says ‘leadership’ is the answer. I wonder why we should believe that, when politicians are actually exercising leadership all the time, in the manner their interests direct. Leadership conferred by outbidding other leaders for the favour of the public is precisely where consumerist politics comes from.
Can an individual, or body of people, acting without thought, in a mood of crowd-pleasing over-excitement, amid a succession of equally superfluous and ill-considered acts, be said to have consciously intended anything at all? In an ideal world, there would be effective safeguards against such people.
– Catherine Bennett, on the will of parliament, in Britain the manner of exercising and dispensing absolute power.
I see that the swear-blogger with a nice turn of phrase, Obnoxio The Clown, has developed a love for Malta. Good observations he makes, not least about the lovely ladies of said island. Indeed – I am married to one of them. Anyway, in a week’s time from today, yours truly will complete his scuba diving course – done with the PADI organisation – in the island of Gozo, just to the north of Malta. Weather conditions should be good. I will not be allowed to dive more than a certain level in my course – you have to do more training to go much deeper – but the views promise to be spectacular.
The seas around Malta are very deep, so I don’t know whether I will get to see any wrecks. One of the grim aspects of that part of the world is how much stuff was sunk during WW2. There must be loads of bits of old RAF and German aircraft down there as well, I would imagine.
Via the David Thompson blog – which has a weird and wonderful collection of oddball stuff every Friday, I came across this aspect of science fiction movies.
Some nifty photos and links on this website as well.
“To anyone who pays more attention to Ben Bernanke than Ben Affleck, walking away from a prime gig like Palin’s was virtually incomprehensible, signalling either imminent scandal or incipient dementia. To the rest of America, Palin’s move made perfect sense, firmly cementing her status as perhaps the one politician who truly feels our ennui. First she cheerfully admitted that she had no idea what the vice president actually does all day (just like me!) Then she stared blankly when asked to reveal her thoughts on the Bush Doctrine (the what?) Then, after earning even higher Nielsen ratings in her first big prime-time showcase than the American Idol finale, only to return to Alaska and the dull reality of mulling over potential appointees to the Board of Barbers and Hair Dressers, she bailed. Sorry, politics, she’s just not that into you.”
– Greg Beato.
He’s talking about how the media/political establishment was befuddled by Sarah Palin’s resignation from the Alaska governorship a few months ago.
There is a nice article in the Daily Telegraph today talking of how humans, be they religious, pagan or unbeliever alike have celebrated the festival of the harvest, in this time of Keats’ “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”. And as we remember the other day after the death of “Green Revolution” scientist Norman Borlaug, the harvest has been something that we not only take for granted these days, but have even reached the point where, in recent years, our political leaders have thought fit to actually pay farmers not to grow stuff. The idea of set-aside subsidies was, if I recall rightly, one of those many terrible ideas of Roosevelt in the Great Depression.
Some idea of how far we have travelled comes up in this nugget of information from David Carpenter’s account of early Medieval Britain, The Struggle for Mastery. On page 36, we come across this:
“On the estates of the Bishop of Winchester yields of wheat remained around eight to twelve bushels per acre (a bushel is 36 litres), where on modern farms they are in the seventies.”
Such a massive increase has a lot to do with why, despite the population increase since the 12th Century, Britain had a sufficient surplus of food production to embark on an Industrial Revolution several centuries later. For in the time of William the Conqueror and for some time thereafter, mass famine was a grim reality of life.
So I will be celebrating the harvest this year and salute the scientists, farmers and yes, the commodities speculators of Chicago and elsewhere for making our daily bread as plentiful as it is. Here’s to them. Now, shall I go for wheat beer or the barley variety later this evening?
I don’t want to use these hallowed pages as a forum to moan about the odd personal gripe, but I think I can find an excuse as there is a larger point. What am talking about? I am talking about the fact that at my local London Tube (underground for you non-Brits) station, the down-escalator has been taken out of service for almost nine months. It is in Pimlico, and serves the Victoria line, one of the deeper of the stations in the capital. Result: I, along with everyone else, have to walk down a long flight of stairs, which was a bit of a problem recently after I suffered a painful foot injury (now mercifully healed). It also meant that it is impossible sometimes to use that station if you have heavy luggage. A disabled person would have to go to another station, which is hardly a great advertisement for public transport.
The explanation given for why it has taken this time to service and replace an escalator seems to be something like this: spare parts for these things are incredibly rare and specialised and take months to make. I can even remember once reading several years ago about how the Tube engineers were trying to find spare parts on Ebay. Now, a thought occurs: surely, in this era of computer-aided design, or CAD, and just-in-time stock inventory systems, it should be possible for an engineer, supplied with the correct measurements, to fabricate whatever spare parts he or she needs to fit into something like an escalator, or for that matter, an aircraft engine. And yet this does not appear to be the case.
Of course, another explanation is that the building contractors who work on the Tube, while they may contain some excellent staff, contain an awful lot of leeches who are happy to pocket the contract money and then spin out their contracts for as long as possible. So it may be that the procurement process is woefully inefficient. Even so, our forefathers who built much of Britain’s industrial landscape would regard such delays with contempt. I bet this guy would not have been very happy.
George Gilder – author of such books as the Spirit of Enterprise, has a nice essay up about the technological savvy and business prowess of Israel’s IT sector. Makes a change to read something about that country that does not involve armed conflict. But then, as we should remember, it is the sheer success of Israel as an economic unit, as much as anything else, that drives its would-be destroyers nuts, because it shows up their own massive failings.
I would like to get Gilder’s new book on Israel. As if my reading list were not long enough as it is.
“We’ve heard ample warnings about extremist paranoia in the months since Barack Obama became president, and we’re sure to hear many more throughout his term. But we’ve heard almost nothing about the paranoia of the political center. When mainstream commentators treat a small group of unconnected crimes as a grand, malevolent movement, they unwittingly echo the very conspiracy theories they denounce. Both brands of connect-the-dots fantasy reflect the tellers’ anxieties much more than any order actually emerging in the world.”
Jesse Walker, talking about how the likes of Glenn Beck and other conservative commentators are being targeted by an increasingly jumpy “liberal center”. This is a good article and it has a certain relevance too here in Britain. If something like talk radio or a UK equivalent of Fox were to take off, just imagine the commentary from the MSM.
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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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